


Smoke Cloud Rises

by MissAvaline



Series: Smoke Cloud Series [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: AU but still in Canon verse, Completely Kylux, Emperor Hux, Even though he wishes he could, Hux can't get over Kylo Ren, M/M, Minor Character Death, Original Character Death(s), Some angst, With some matt thrown in, might be graphic but it's really brief, some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 08:01:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 31,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6509659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissAvaline/pseuds/MissAvaline
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ren’s demeanor hardened. “You think this is hate?” </p>
<p>Hux glanced down to the wound on his arm. “Well it sure as hell isn’t love.” </p>
<p>“That weapon was aimed at your skull,” said Ren tersely. “If it was hate, I’d have let it hit its mark.” </p>
<p>Hux scoffed and said sardonically, “Well that’s something I guess.” </p>
<p>“What else do you want from me?” Ren’s voice faltered but his features were wiped clean of any emotions that might betray him. “Do you want me to tell you how I felt when that dimwitted officer accidentally discharged the weapon that was aimed at your head? Do you want me to tell you how much I loathed the fact that what happened to you today was my fault? Do you want me to tell you how I actually contemplated throwing myself in its line of fire if I couldn’t stop it or redirect it? Is that what you want to hear?”<br/>***<br/>Snoke is Emperor. General Hux's treacherous plot has been discovered and he's defected from the First Order. The betrayal of General Hux and the events that took place the night Starkiller Base was destroyed has broken Kylo Ren down physically and mentally. Matt knows the only person who can save Kylo is Hux, but Hux is gone. Matt sets off to find him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Echoes of The Past

**Author's Note:**

> A big thank you to [Couronnebead](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6079452/chapters/13934604) for beta reading my story for me. Check out her amazing fic First Steps. 
> 
> Also a big shoutout to sirins-tree on tumblr who made this beautiful [artwork](http://sirins-tree.tumblr.com/post/140996596535/a-scene-from-smoke-cloud-blues-fic)
> 
> for the prologue of this series, which really inspired and motivated me to keep writing this fic. 
> 
> Finally, I promised a lovely anon on tumblr that I'd write a scene for this fic based of a prompt where Hux get's the munchies late at night and runs into Matt in the kitchen on the Finalizer. I couldn't work Matt into the scene, but I hope you like my take on the prompt nonetheless.
> 
> Now without further ado, Part Two is finally up, thank you all for your patience!

It has been one year.

One year since Kylo Ren ripped everything that has ever mattered to the man who was once known as General Hux. One year and he still thinks of Kylo Ren every single day, more than anything else he’d lost.

Naturally that would be the case, Hux—just Hux now, a General of nothing—thinks each time he catches his thoughts trickling over to Ren again. It was because of Ren that Hux was here; on this cold, barren, backwater planet with it’s dried yellow grass and where the suns light only shines for eight hours in a day.

He tells himself that he’s cursing Ren every time he thinks about that faithless wretch, but the truth is Hux knows deep down he is only ever cursing himself. It was his fault, his own misstep that brought him here. Every empire is always just one misstep from ruin at the hands of a careless ruler and Ren had been Hux’s misstep—the thing that brought Hux’s empire to the ground; before it even had the chance to rise.

Hux brought this upon himself, of that he will admit to, yet still he doesn’t believe he deserves any of this.

As Hux crouches down on the ground behind the stump of a tree, a hunting rifle positioned in his hands, he recalls a memory. The memory is all too familiar to him now, one he’d replayed a million times before. Hux found the significance in that memory only in the cold irony it bore. Hux had seen the threat Ren possessed to him even then, he had acknowledged it with his very lips and yet he allowed that threat to destroy him all the same.

They had been standing alone in an empty corridor aboard the _Finalizer_ , outside the chamber where they had just held audience with Snoke’s hologram. Snoke had approved Hux’s plan for their attack on Jakku over Ren’s.

“Keep Kylo Ren away from the battle until the end,” Hux had proposed to Snoke. “I know he wants to take part in the battle itself, but I strongly advise against it. Kylo Ren is your most powerful weapon, Supreme Leader, and as with all powerful weapons it’s might should not be squandered on insignificant battles.”

It was good advice from a strategic standpoint, Hux knew it— it’s always best to hide the prowess of your most powerful weapon from your enemies to maintain the element of surprise, to keep them from finding a powerful weapon of their own to retaliate with. Even Snoke knew it, and perhaps Ren did as well but that didn’t spare Hux from the brunt of Ren’s indignation. They had been no more than five paces away from the blast door of the hologram chamber when Hux was violently hurled up against the wall with Ren’s gloved hands wrapped in fists around the collar of his uniform. Even now Hux distinctly remembers himself cringing at the knowledge of the wrinkles that Ren was creating in his carefully pressed uniform and the memory causes the hair on his arm to rise like hearing nails scratching on black slate.

“Is that all I am to you?” Ren snarled through the amplifier of his mask. “A weapon?”

Hux grasped the wrists of the hands that were assaulting the fabric of his uniform. The touch made Ren’s grip tighten and Hux felt the pressure of Ren’s body pushing further up against him. As always the memory is vivid; Hux can still feel the cold from the hard metal that lined the walls of the _Finalizer_ seeping through the back of his uniform. He can see his reflection in Ren’s mask; his face calm, his gaze even as he searched for Ren’s eyes behind the black slits in that mask. Hux always found himself doing that, searching for Ren’s eyes behind the black slits, as though he believed that if he could look into those eyes he could reach Ren.

Ren’s choice of words was no accident, the sentence had been phrased deliberately and it told Hux that Ren had not yet forgotten Hux’s slight against him when he broke his promise to the knight to keep the secret of that clone of his from Snoke. And Hux knew too that it was more than a betrayal of his secret that drew Ren’s animosity, but what came before the betrayal itself.

Hux’s mind was wired to always play to his strategic advantage even if his emotions wanted to do something else and so he said, pushing a smirk onto his lips, “Did you expect to be something more to me?”

Ren’s other fist flew up and slammed into the wall right next to Hux’s head with such might Hux felt the vibration rippling through the metal of the wall he was pressed up against. It was a wonder how the action didn’t shatter Ren’s knuckles into pieces. Hux’s eyes traced the lines of Ren’s body in an effort to detect whether he had caused himself any pain; if Ren was in pain he didn’t show it.

“You’re a deceptive piece of shit,” Ren breathed out in a low rasp through his mask’s amplifier.

“Deceptive?” said Hux. “How have I deceived you? You’re not still on about that nasty business with the clone are you?” Hux replaced the smirk on his face that had fallen off with Ren’s fist crushing into the wall by his face. “It’s not really even about the clone is it? It’s about what came before?”

Ren’s body tensed and an odd sucking noise escaped the mask.

“Why Lord Ren, I never imagined you’d have a little crush on me,” Hux said with a small laugh. He wasn’t entirely sure why he was saying it, taunting Ren by humiliating him served no purpose at all except to make Hux come off as juvenile and churlish. Yet he couldn’t stop himself from saying it. Hux has since come to realize that he had said it because he wanted to see how Ren would react; it was important for some reason, for Hux to know if his speculations were true.

“I-I don’t, you-you don’t—” Ren’s stuttering through the mask in his over processed voice made Hux feel as though he was listening to cracking words spoken from the other end of a broken commlink. “I don’t have a crush.”

“Don’t you?” said Hux. Was he exposing Ren’s denial or voicing his own? “I was courteous to you and you mistook that for flirtation, if that isn’t a crush I don’t know what is.”

“No,” said Ren, his grip on Hux’s collar loosened but still he did not release him. “Not flirtation…merely friendship.” The voice softened at the end, and hearing that, the smirk Hux had planted on his face fell and this time he could not draw it back up.

Friendship. Ren had meant it. That sentiment was sincere…of course it was, emotions were always sincere with Ren, it was Hux who was the master of duplicity. Ren was right about him, he was a deceptive piece of shit.

Hux should have continued to deceive but he couldn’t. Hearing the confirmation that Ren wanted for there to be something more between them than animosity or simple professional courtesy, even if that thing he wanted was just friendship, stirred something in Hux.

“Ren…I—”

Ren released his hold on Hux abruptly before Hux could complete his sentence. The knight pulled away from him with a flurry as violent as when he had lunged forward to shove Hux against that wall.

He turned his back to Hux, poised to leave; saying over his shoulder as though the last few moments of their conversation never happened, “Be careful, General. The next time you undermine me in front of Supreme Leader Snoke again I might take it personally.”

“Once again, Ren, I wasn’t trying to undermine you. Why can’t I make you see that?” said Hux. Ren gave no response and began to walk away, but Hux stopped him before he could get too far. “Ren, be angry with me if you must for my deception, I’ll admit I earned it. But you need to stop fighting me. I’m on your side.”

The flash of silver from Ren’s mask glinted under the light in the corridor as Ren angled his head slightly to look over his shoulder at Hux. “The only person whose side you’ve ever been on is your own,” said Ren. “And General, I’m not your weapon.”

“No,” said Hux sharply. “You’re _his_.” He jerked his head to the closed blast door of Snoke’s holochamber and just as he did, Ren spun around, arm raised and Hux felt his body lift from the ground. He sailed through the air and felt his bones tremble with agony as he crashed against the very blast door he had gestured towards just seconds ago.

“Never say that to me again; never even think it,” said Ren, his voice unsteady. “I am no one’s weapon.”

Crouched down in the crisp, yellow grass the memory fades along with the echo of the dull pain tearing through his bones. Hux sits quiet and still, eyes forward and fixed on the herd of wild banthas grazing in the field. Hux had seen the beasts before on another planet. Those were great, strong muscled creatures with massive tusks, unlike these. The small herd of banthas Hux was stalking out for prey were small, scrawny animals; underdeveloped like everything else on this desolate planet. But they packed enough meat for three days worth of meals, and hunting them gave Hux a way to pass the time.

He spots the fattest of the animals standing in the center of the herd, adjusts the rifle in his hand and peers into the scope. He inhales. _One…two…three…_ he counts in his head and squeezed his finger down on the trigger. One…two…three…he counts again, as the bullet pierces the animal’s dark round eye and the bantha falls to the ground with a heavy thud that rattles the rest of the herd and sends them off running.

The hunting rifle with it’s rusted iron scope mount and wooden stock was the most primitive weapon Hux had ever wrapped his arms around. Even after a year Hux still longed for the ease and strength of a blaster each time he pressed his fingers down on the wobbly trigger that sometimes jammed on the trigger guard. At least Hux was still a very good shot no matter the weapon he used, knowing that, seeing proof of his skill each time he shot down an animal from even the furthest of distances was one of the few things that still made Hux feel like himself.

_One…two…three,_ Hux counts as he walks across the field to retrieve his game, hunting bag and rifle slung over his back. He draws in a breath and counts again, _one…two…three…_

He lifts the carcass over his shoulders careful to position the dead animal so that the steady drip of blood beading out from it’s eye fell to the ground and not onto his clothing.

“One…two…three…breathe. One…two…three…breathe…” now he is counting out loud, murmuring under his breath as he makes his way across the field, back towards the house. The counting was a habit of his from his childhood, one he thought he’d out grown. When the habit first returned, exactly one month and three days after he’d landed his stolen shuttle in the woods of this sad, primitive planet, Hux had felt a sharp desperation to keep the old habit from consuming him, each time he’d catch himself counting he’d try to will himself to stop. Now, he barely noticed when he did it.

“One…two…three…breathe…” It takes exactly two thousand and sixty seven steps to walk from the field to the shed behind his house, that was exactly six hundred and eighty nine sets of three counts. If ever there were even a single set of three counts more than six hundred and eighty nine, Hux would feel a burning ire in the pit of his stomach that itched with the need to walk all the way back to the field, and begin his count again. As a child he would have, but his condition had not regressed to such extremes…not yet, at least.

Hux reaches the door of the shed, pulls it opened and steps inside, to where there is an old wooden table on top of which a row of shiny, sharp knifes are rested in a perfectly straight line descending by size from right to left. The table had once been old and stained and covered in moss, but Hux had sanded the thing down and scrubbed it clean of every last speck of wear and age, now it looks new and unused, like everything else in the shed, just the way Hux likes things to be—perfect and pristine.

Hux shifts the weight of the carcass on his shoulders before he hooks the hunting bag up on a nail by the door, and places the rifle onto a rack beneath the window. Then he pulls a plastic tarp over the table before dropping the carcass on top.

“One…two…three…breathe…” The strain of lugging the animal on his shoulder exerted him and he feels a cloud of a cough rising from his chest, before it pushes out of his lungs and Hux jerks forward over the dead animal slumped on the table top, in a coughing fit. The coughing is another thing he thought he had outgrown from his childhood that had returned over the last year. This one returned more recently, within the last month or so and Hux knows it is only a matter of time before the shortness of breath and the tightness in his chest and the struggle to breathe returned as well.

Hux closes his eyes, and tries to breathe deeply, in his mind he begins to visualize himself reaching for a vial containing medication from his back pocket. He begins to visualize himself flicking open the lid, bringing that vial to his mouth and inhaling. He feels imaginary air pushing into his lungs. It has been almost a lifetime since Hux had actually physically went through the movements of administering the medication to himself, but he can still remember it and he draws up that memory now, the sweet and acidic, powdery taste of the medicine on his tongue, the sting as the air trickles down his throat soothing the muscles of his lungs, opening up his air passage allowing him to breathe again. Slowly, the coughing slows to a stop.

It was a trick he had taught himself when he first started at the military academy. It was bad enough that he had been the smallest in his year and was frail looking with willowy limbs, and Hux knew that regardless of who’s son he was, he never would have qualified to attend the academy in the first place if it had been known that he had a breathing condition. Yet one thing had always been true for Hux: even when his body was weak, his mind was strong. And so he forced himself to stave off his medication whenever he felt his lungs closing and told himself to visualize taking the medication in lieu of physically taking it, until one day, he stopped needing it all together. It was then, when he had cured his own chronic ailment with nothing but his mind, that young Hux realized the limitless potentials of his powerful mind.

Limitless, that was, until Kylo Ren entered his life.

With the coughing suppressed for the time being Hux turned his attention to the carcass. A pool of blood had gathered on the tarp from the pierced eye. Hux takes in the sight of the beast lying dead on the table before him. Less than an hour ago the beast had been alive, eating and shitting and frocking in the yellow field, and now it is not, and it is because of Hux. Holding the power to snuff out life in the blink of an eye in the palm of his hands, was to Hux, the very definition of power and Hux remembers a time when he held greater power.

He thinks of his precious Starkiller, that magnificent weapon that had been conceived from his mind. The day he stood on that platform, with his entire army assembled beneath him, watching his weapon color the sky red and gold as an entire system was wiped from existence, Hux had never felt more like a God. That was him, that was who Hux should have been; powerful, exulted, a living deity. That is his destiny… _was_ his destiny.

Not anymore.

Now he is nothing. A sad man clinging on to the feeling of power from stripping a dumb, insignificant animal of its life. He’s neither powerful nor exulted nor anything close to a God…he is simply…

Who is he?

Ben. Ben Solo.

Yes. Ben Solo. That’s the name he goes by now. It was the only name he could conjure from his mind when he stumbled out of the shuttle a year ago - starving and weak from days without food and water - and found himself looking into the terrified and dazed faces of the horde of villagers that had gathered around his ship.

Ben Solo. That’s who he is now.

_“My condolences,”_ comes a voice from inside his mind, a rich, deep, distinctive voice that is not his own.

Hux would recognize that voice anywhere.

_“Why do you say that?”_ Hux’s own voice replied in thought, as he picked up one of the knives and drew it close to the animal, preparing to skin it.

_“Because Ben Solo died years ago.”_

_“Died years ago?”_ Hux snorts. _“Fuck, you’re always so melodramatic, Ren. Just because you abandoned that identity doesn’t mean you killed him.”_

_“I never asked you, General, of all the names, why did you chose that one?”_

“You have asked me that, Ren,” Hux verbalizes irritably. “Many times.” He slides the blade smoothly beneath the skin on the underbelly of the animal, drawing a clean, perfectly straight line of lukewarm blood that spills onto his hands. The sight of the blood staining his clothes, dirtying him up, stabbed at him and, as the sight of uncleanliness always does, and Hux aches with the need to clean himself instantly. But he clenched his teeth and continued on skinning the animal even though it tortured him to do so. Precisely _because_ it tortured him to do so.

_“Well then you never answered.”_

_“Well then that means I don’t fucking want to answer,”_ Hux growls _._

_“Is that it?”_ the voice taunts. _“Or are you just avoiding answering that question because you don’t want to know the answer?”_

Hux inhales sharply, anger beginning to mount inside of him. There is a tremble in his hands that could have been from the fury rising from his gut or from nicotine withdrawal…Hux can’t be sure, he’d been feeling the symptoms of the withdrawal for so long, he can no longer distinguish it from signs of other physical ailments or emotion turmoil.

Hux stabs his blade into the animal, tearing deep down into the tough meat, negating precision, negating the perfect, elegant straight lines he preferred. “You wanna know the answer?” Hux says. “The answer is that I chose your name because I thought it would be fitting.” With his bare hands, he grabs a tuff of the animal’s fur and pulls, ripping the animal’s flesh apart. “I chose your name because you’re the reason I’m here.”

The voice in his head is cold and calm. Too calm and too measured for Ren. _“You have only yourself to blame.”_

Hux raises the knife over his head and plunged it down into the animal as though it was still alive and he was stabbing it to death with a vengeance. “No, I have you to blame!”

The voice speaks again, still calm. _“You betrayed us, General.”_

“No! You. Betrayed. Me!” The words came out like a roar, and with those words Hux lost the last strand of control he held over himself. With the knife in one hand and his other hand bare he stabs and he tears and as he raged on he screams a terrible, wild sound as though he himself was an animal dying a horrible death.

Blood from the mangled carcass splatters against him and drips down his face, blinding him, but still Hux stabs and tears, until he reaches the last section of skin clinging to meat. With one final scream, at the top of his lungs, he splits the skin clean off, sending blood and fur flying into the air around him. Hux rubs the back of his arm over his eyes to clear his vision and straightens himself.

In an instant his calmness returns. His breathing is even, his mind is tranquil, and the shaking in his hand has dissipated. It’s as though the raging fit was a mere illusion that never was.

Hux gazes down at the skinned meat and sets his knife down. There are jagged gashes, oozing with pools of dark blood, in odd places in the flesh, and though the imperfect sight brought on a dull throb to Hux’s head, it wouldn’t affect the taste of the meat after it was cooked.

_“Do you feel better now, General?”_ comes the voice in his head.

“Much,”says Hux, as he moves on to cleaning the animal of its innards.

_“There’s something cathartic about a good tantrum, isn’t there?”_

_“You would know,”_ thought Hux.

_“You and I have always been the same in that regard. I would say you went on just as many rampages as I did in our time aboard the_ Finalizer _. How many times did you need the tiles in your shower replaced?”_ The voice is mocking and filled with mirth that is simply too bright and cheery for Ren.

_“Only difference is, I had the dignity to do it in private so no one knew,”_ Hux replied.

_“I did.”_

_“Yeah?”_ Hux huffs _. “Well you knew everything, didn’t you, Ren?”_

_“I didn’t know about your treacherous plot, not until it was too late.”_

_“And here we are again…”_ Hux steels himself against the incredibly foul smell that emits from the animal’s split bowls. Still the smell hits him in the gut and he has to suppress the urge to retch. His stomach is getting stronger though, as was his tolerance of the smell. There were a few times at the beginning when he did vomit all over the thing that was meant to be his dinner. _“Now I’m getting bored with you. Go away. I’m busy.”_

The voice leaves, but it’ll be back, Hux knows, it always comes back.

That voice in his head, that was something new; not an old habit from his childhood that had resurfaced to haunt him. The first time he heard that voice was three months after he landed on this backwater planet. The voice came to him late one night as he was lying awake, staring at a spider crawling across the ceiling. That deep, husky, familiar voice flew into his mind so suddenly that Hux had been so startled he sat straight up in bed. At the time he hadn’t been sure if perhaps that voice had actually been Ren speaking to him, over the distance of the galaxy that lies between them, through the Force. There were even times when he desperately wanted to believe it was Ren talking to him in his head. But over time Hux had come to accept the truth that the voice is only a voice in his head taking the form of Ren’s.

Ren, who is several systems away, has no idea where Hux is, Hux is certain of that. And he knows that that is for the best. For if Ren did know where Hux is, he wouldn’t be making conversation with Hux in his head, he would be here with an army at his back ready to plunge that lightsaber of his straight into Hux’s chest.

***

The Emperor sits on a lifted platform atop a throne of gold. A black tulle veil covers his monstrous face, but everyone knows what is under there and they stand in terrified silence beneath him. The town square is crowded with people, spectators, as one by one men and women in ragged bloodied clothes are dragged in chains before the Emperor.

The prisoners are forced to their knees and wordlessly the Emperor waves his hand at the tall masked figure swathed in dark cloths at his side. The masked figure, less a man and more a monster than the Emperor himself moves, one heavy step after another, drawing close to the kneeling prisoners. Just a day ago this very square was painted in blood, while bodies were strewn about like litter in the street. There had been a riot, an uprising against the soldiers of the Imperial First Order and against the Emperor himself.

The prisoners kneeling before the Emperor are the known leaders of the uprising. Today is the day of their execution and, as a reminder of the fate of those who would dare to rise against the Emperor, every person living in the city are forced to stand in the square and watch—every person, including Matt.

Matt stands alone on a balcony that overlooks the square from his quarters in the palace. He’s looking down at all the people, and though they all stand silently with bated breath Matt can sense them. He can sense the fear and the anger and the sadness amongst them. He can’t remember the last time he sensed anything else from the people around him.

Such is the way with war Matt understands now.

Before he saw it with his own eyes, before he lived through it, Matt had only ever read about war in his books. People seemed to love writing about war, almost as much as they loved fighting them. The books had told him about the pain and the destruction and the carnage war brings, but none had fully described the true horror. None had told him that he’d see grown men lying in their own shit and piss as they drew their last tormented breathes or that he’d walk past children in the streets slowly starving to death.

_Why,_ Matt wonders often, _do people seem to love war so much that they would fill their histories with something so horrible?_

As his eyes scan the square they find their way to the masked figure on the platform—Kylo Ren, or, at least he is the shell of the man who had once been Kylo Ren. Even after all this time Matt still has to remind himself that Kylo is gone, that he’d lost him the day that Starkiller Base exploded into pieces, the day Kylo killed his father, the day General Hux defected from the First Order.

Matt watches the way Kylo moves at the Emperor’s command, stiffly and automatically, with less life in him than a droid. Kylo had been this way for a year now, ever since he woke from that bacta tank a month following the destruction of Starkiller Base.

On the night everything changed; the planet had been just moments away from explosion when Kylo was dragged back aboard the _Finalizer_ , half conscious and covered in blood. Even now Matt still remembers the nights of pacing around in his chambers, desperate to go to the medbay, wanting to be by Kylo’s side, and feeling the anger and helplessness at being told each time that he didn’t have the clearance to pay visits to Kylo Ren.

“I don’t need clearance,” Matt had shouted more than once at the droids that turned him away. “Don’t you know who I am?”

They did know who he was. He was the low level radar technician and nothing else.

The weeks Kylo spent in recovery as the _Finalizer_ slowly drifted towards the base Snoke had been hiding out on, had been the longest weeks in Matt’s life. His days had been filled with frightened thoughts of losing Kylo. Matt had read before that part of the human condition was the perpetual fear of losing the things one loves the most, and in those weeks of worrying over whether or not Kylo would live, Matt felt more human than he’d ever imagined he’d feel. He didn’t realize at the time that he could still lose Kylo even if he lived.

Matt listened for news every day following the destruction of the Starkiller Base. No one told him anything, he was a mere technician, nearly invisible and privy to nothing, but from the whispers in the corridors Matt had gathered that Hux was gone, that he had betrayed the First Order and left Kylo to die in the snow. The first time Matt heard the news he felt a venomous rage coiling through the pits of his stomach and he remembers thinking to himself that this must be what hatred felt like.

Matt puts his reminiscence aside as he sees Kylo on that platform raising a gloved hand. Slowly, one of the prisoners, a woman, is lifted off the ground. She begins to scream. In the air her body writhes in agony, she twists, bending from side to side, contorting in strange directions as though she had no bones in her body. Her screams fill the square while everyone else stands in silence. And then she is on her back in the air, folded nearly in half, as her heart is torn from her chest. The heart levitates over her body, swollen and dripping in blood.

A single soft cry is heard from the spectators before silence falls once more. The woman drops to the ground like a rag being tossed to the side.

Kylo moves to the next prisoner and Matt looks away. He doesn’t want to watch anymore of this. He withdraws from the balcony, retreating into the safety of his quarters. Like everyone else Matt was ordered to watch the execution, he knows this and he doesn’t care. Everyone else standing in the square can only see the pain, but Matt can feel it, he can feel the suffering that overrides the terror leading up to the last draw of breath and he can feel the emptiness emanating off of Kylo as he pulls the life from his victims like he was nothing more than a machine, soulless and unfeeling. Perhaps this is what Kylo has always wanted to be, but in all Matt’s years of wanting to be Kylo, this had never been the Kylo he wanted to see. Matt doesn’t want to be a part of any of this.

He draws away from the balcony and as he does so he thinks of General Hux and curses the man as he had done a million times before; it’s become something of a twisted prayer.

Matt doesn’t know much, but he knows this—this world was built by General Hux. All this pain, all this suffering, all this death, it is all Hux’s doing. This empire Snoke now rules over had been built from the blueprints Hux had spent a lifetime carefully drawing out. Hux did this, he did this to the galaxy, he did this to Kylo, and then he disappeared and left them all amongst the carnage.

General Hux is a cruel and terrible man, Matt thinks, and he tries to recall the General’s face. He sees the chiseled jawline, the brutal green eyes, and the taut line of those enduringly pursed lips. Matt remembers Hux in his most glorious moment— standing on a platform of his own the day he launched his cherished weapon. Matt remembers as the General delivered his speech before a different crowd, a crowd that was silent out of awe, not fear. At one point the sunlight had moved and cast it’s rays over the General, pouring over his red hair like a golden crown, and Matt remembers thinking that’s how an Emperor ought to look, fierce and mighty and proud. Hux looked neither cruel nor terrible then, but what he did next was both.

Just as Matt had felt the agony of the prisoner woman he’d just witnessed the brutal execution of, Matt had felt the pain and the suffering as the planets of the Hosnian systems died. And Matt had looked up at Hux, standing with his gaze casted skywards, eyes glittering while billions died, like he had never been more moved by anything before in his entire existence. That was the moment Matt learned for the first time in his life how deceiving looks can be.

Another memory of Hux comes to Matt’s mind, an earlier memory, one that had taken place several months before the man’s betrayal. It was the only significant encounter he had ever had with General Hux, and looking back on the encounter now, Matt thinks to himself that he should have known then the cruelty Hux was capable of.

Matt had been a radar technician aboard the _Finalizer_ for a month by that point. His daily tasks should have grown easier as the time passed but they didn’t. Weeks rolled by and day after day Matt was given the same tiresome tasks, with the same limited instructions on how to preform those tasks, and day after day Matt struggled. The only thing that grew was his frustration and the impatience of his supervisor. By the end of the month, Matt had been placed on probation with his supervisor reminding him every day, “One last screw up, Matt, and I’ll make sure you never work another day as a radar technician aboard this or any other ship again.”

Matt’s days as a radar technician had been long and stressful and the day he encountered General Hux he had been tearing away at the wires of a metal bench he had been tasked with fixing in the interrogation chamber. His frustrations had boiled over and Matt couldn’t hold it in any longer. Matt had never received much guidance from Kylo on how to deal with his frustrations and so he responded instinctively, giving way to all his pent up grievances by tearing destructively into the bench he was meant to repair.

“Problem, Technician?” came Hux’s cold, smooth voice just outside the holding cell.

Matt froze with both hands coiled around the wires, and turned his head to face the General. He was drawn up to full height, green eyes mercilessly fixed on Matt, and his face was unreadable.

“No,” Matt said, and those green eyes flashed.

“No, sir,” said Hux crisply. “let me rephrase, Technician, why are you tearing apart my ship?”

“I’m fixing the bench,” said Matt, his frustrations were still boiling over and it leaked into his words in a way that made him sound as though he was snapping at the General. The tone did not go unnoticed and Hux’s eyes narrowed, icy and authoritative, and by the grace of some innate survival instinct Matt recognized that as a look of warning. “I’m fixing the bench, sir,” he amended, in a softer tone. Matt worried immediately after that that a mere change in tone might not be enough. He knew little of the nature of powerful men but what he did know from his books was that their egos often demanded lauding and a decent grovel.

But Hux simply moved past Matt’s impertinence and said, “And tearing the wires out of my interrogation bench is meant to fix it?”

Matt looked down at the tangled wires in his hands, that mess of colored rubber and hairs of copper and was overcome by his fury once more. “I don’t actually know how to fix it.”

“Well, you could have fooled me,” said Hux, but Matt barely heard him.  

Unable to control himself he began to tear at the wires once more, pulling from the opening behind the chair. “Everyone wants me to just do things and fix things! But no one wants to tell me how to actually do it!” He rants. Matt threw the wires on the floor, the plastic casings barely made an audible click as it hit the ground; that in and of itself was an affront to Matt who had hoped to make a ruckus by throwing the wires, to match the tone of his tantrum. Clenching his jaw he brought the heel of his boot down on the wires and began to stomp on them. “Now, they’re saying that if I can’t fix this stupid bench I’m going to be dismissed like it’s my fault that this stupid bench is broken and I can’t fix it!” He put all his energy into a violent stomp of his right foot, crushing down on the wires. “And it’s not my fault! And it’s not fair! It’s not fair! It’s not—” Suddenly, something makes Matt halt in the middle of his tirade.

Breathing heavy, with his glasses skewed on his face, Matt looked to the thing that had distracted him from his rage. It was Hux punching in a set of codes that lowered the blast door to the ground, shutting the two of them inside the chamber together.

“What are you doing?” asked Matt, he was still tense all over.

Hux said nothing as he drew closer to him. Matt eyed him warily. Hux removed his leather gloves, one finger at a time. He went around the back of the angled bench and rested the gloves over it. Then, the General began to run his fingers down the buttons of his uniform. Matt’s eyes widened, as he realized too late, what Hux was doing.

“What are you…”

The General unclasped his shiny buckled belt, and swiftly pulled off his uniform top, draping that over the back of the bench as well.

Matt was certain he stopped breathing. The General was standing in front of him in a thin white undershirt. Matt could make out the contours of Hux’s muscles underneath the fabric. He was different than Kylo. He wasn’t shredded for one thing and he lacked all the bulking definition Kylo had on his body. All those long nights of laying against Kylo, tracing his fingers around the groove of Kylo’s well defined torso admiring it, Matt had wondered if all men’s bodies looked like that, or if some were like his own— skinny and flat. With Hux standing before him his arms bare and his torso covered by little more than a single sheet of cotton fabric, Matt realized two things: the first was that Hux is the only man, other than Kylo or himself, who’s body Matt had seen and the second was that, though Hux’s body was not like Kylo’s, it wasn’t like his own either.

In short, he General looked like a solider, strong and fit, with lean muscles filling out his slight body.

“Hux, what are you doing?” said Matt, finding that his throat was dry.

“ _General_ Hux suits me much better,” said the General, crouching down on the floor below Matt. “And I’m fixing the bench. At least that’s what I hope to do, if you’ll kindly move your feet off the wires.”

Matt looked down to his feet, still crushing down on the wires, and steadily rose his eyes up to Hux’s face. Hux was looking up at him, and Matt wasn’t sure if it was just the light, but underneath a fringe of near translucent lashes, the General’s eyes were so very green. Matt never even imagined eyes could be that color, or that they could shine in that way.

Clumsily, Matt removed his foot, stumbling slightly backwards. He braced himself against the bench.

“You know how to fix this thing?” said Matt skeptically. He didn’t know why he found the notion so hard to believe.

“It’s simple enough,” said the General, taking the wires in his bare hands. He reached into the metal toolbox Matt had been handed by his supervisor and pulled out one of the strange tools inside, pliers, he believed that particular tool was called.

“But this is a radar technician’s job,” said Matt, figuring out the reason behind his disbelief. From his books Matt learned that in the great big galaxy, there were a billion civilizations and while all those civilizations differed in belief and culture and custom, there was one thing they all had in common—hierarchy. The lowly and the elite, the peasants and the nobles. And General Hux with his fair skin and the elegant bone structure of his face was most certainly a man of higher birth. Matt learned that in every hierarchy, the high-born had their jobs and the low-born had theirs and those jobs never crossed. “You know how to do a radar technician’s job?”

Matt found that indeed the General did. Hux was effortlessly moving along, replacing the torn wires with skilled fingers.

“I do,” said Hux. “And I know how to do the fire control officer’s job, and the fighter pilot’s job and even the cook’s job.” Matt would say Hux said this all proudly with a quirk of his lips, but the General was always proud; pride practically bled from the man’s pores. Matt had seen it in the way he strutted about the ship, like a king amongst his subjects.

“But you’re the General,” said Matt. He still couldn’t wrap his head around what he was hearing, it went against the limited knowledge he possessed of how things worked. Though, Matt supposed, an inherent problem of limited knowledge was that he was bound to find many things that went against what he expected.

“I wasn’t born a General,” said Hux, clipping at the wires. Why he was doing that Matt hadn’t the slightest clue. “Besides, my job requires me to assess the efficiency of my men’s ability to do their jobs and I can’t do that if I don’t understand what those jobs are.”

“Kylo says you don’t like getting your hand’s dirty,” Matt blurted out. Matt noticed the way Hux’s hands slowed in the midst of rewiring at the mention of Kylo’s name. It was only a brief hitch that left Matt wondering if he’d seen it at all.

“Did he say that?” Hux’s words were dry. “Well you can tell Ren that just because I don’t like to get my hands dirty doesn’t mean I can’t when I need to.”

A simple statement and yet there was another meaning behind those words that Matt couldn’t quite grasp. That was another thing about people Matt had been struggling to understand. People’s words were rarely straight forward, rarely what they seem, always filled with hidden meanings, colored by their intricate emotions and relationships with one another.

“You dyed your hair,” said Hux, when Matt did not respond to his previous remark. He kept his eyes on his work, which told Matt that the observation must have been made some time ago. Which, Matt reasoned, was rather expected. The black had faded from Matt’s hair weeks ago, having lasted little more than a few hours—the ink he had used to color his hair was not designed for such purposes. It left Matt’s formerly orange locks with odd streaks for weeks, and when the color finally faded completely Matt found that his hair had grown dry and straw-like and the formally orange hue had been stripped out and replaced by a deep shade of brassy-yellow.

Matt knew his hair was hideous, more so than it had been before, but he didn’t possess the vanity to care about such things. Or at least he thought he didn’t, until the General, kneeling down on the ground by his feet, getting his hands dirty with a job Matt should have been doing, remarked on it. Suddenly, Matt found himself combing his hands through those dried, tangled strands, wishing once more that he had hair like Kylo’s but for a much different reason than before.

“You need to stop talking about Ren so much,” said the General, breaking the silence once again.

Need. Not should; the tone in which those words were delivered was like an order.

“Why?” asked Matt.

“Because if you keep going on and on about Ren to everyone you speak to, people are going to start thinking that you _are_ him.”

The idea that someone might mistake him for Kylo tickled Matt, as though the mistake would serve as some sort of validation for what Matt had always wanted.

“Why would they think I’m him, just because I talk about him?”

“That’s just how people work,” said Hux.

Matt found it difficult to wrap his mind around the concept. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t see how one variable led to another, especially not when it came to Kylo.

“Kylo would never talk about himself,” Matt said out loud. No, Kylo would never talk about himself, not in any esteemed way. There was always something in Kylo, a perpetual self-loathing that always made him question his own worth. Kylo had never been able to see himself the way Matt saw him—as something that was beautiful and immeasurable.

“That might be true,” said Hux. “But you can’t expect other people to know that. People are prone to self-aggrandizement by nature and for that reason they expect the same from others.”

“What’s so bad about people thinking I’m Kylo?” Matt didn’t see how something like that could ever be bad.

“If my men start thinking that you’re Ren, they’re going to start asking themselves why Kylo Ren is going undercover amongst them. Pretty soon, they’re going to figure out that the only reason Ren would do such a thing is because he has reason to mistrust them and I can’t have that happening.” The General replaced the metal plate in the side of the interrogation bench and stood. “If the men begin to believe that they are mistrusted by their superiors than they’ll have no reason to trust us in return.”

“But they are mistrusted and they shouldn’t be trusted.” Matt thought it ought to be obvious. “The stormtroopers are just one mutiny away from tearing down the First Order.” Matt was only regurgitating what he had heard Kylo say, not expressing thoughts of his own, but as far as Matt was concerned if Kylo believed it then it must be true.

Hux’s lips twisted into a smile, but it was unlike any smile Matt had ever seen. There was something off about it; not in his lips but in his eyes, a cold glint, that should have acted as a warning to Matt.

But Matt in his continual naiveté thought nothing of it as the General said simply, “It’s fixed.”

The General went around the bench and began redressing himself. He pulled the uniform on and buttoned it up one by one, with the plier still clutched in one hand. He buckled the silver belt, and gave the uniform a slight tug to straighten it. He left only the gloves, draped over the top of the bench.

“Already?” said Matt. It looked too easy. He went around to the front of the bench, and examined it skeptically. He turned to look at Hux. “You sure it’s fixed?”

“Well,” said Hux delicately, his hands still clutching the pliers. It looked sharp with its two claw-like metal prongs. With barely a change in his easy demeanor, the General said, “Let’s find out!” A firm hand pressed against Matt’s chest and he felt himself being shoved backwards against the cold, hard bench.

The bench looked smooth, a mere metal plank, but Matt discovered quickly that it was so much more than that. An electrical current shot through him the moment he fell against the bench and he felt as though a thousand needles were jabbing into his back. The metal cuffs snapped out, wrapped themselves against Matt’s wrists and with the un-filed edges biting into his skin Matt felt a panic rise in him like he had never felt before.

He struggled against it, trying to free himself from the restraints, but it only caused the metal to tear further into his skin. His eyes darted to the sealed blast door. No one could see or hear him and even if they could, Matt reminded himself, no one would rise against the General to come to his aid.

“Let me go!” said Matt.

Hux moved forward, closing the distance between their bodies, until he was pressed up against Matt with barely any space between them. Matt could feel the General’s muscles, taut and tense against his body, and he could smell him, the fragrance of musky cologne sitting beneath the smell of cigarette smoke. Matt was reminded of the day they stood in the corridor outside the mess hall, in much the same way.

“I’d say the bench looks fixed, wouldn’t you?” the General breathed.

Hux drew the pliers, with those prongs that looked more like claws than ever, in his hand down the side of Matt’s cheek, it tickled more than anything, but a shiver rippled through Matt at the threat that the tickle could turn to sharp, stinging pain at the General’s whim.

“What do you want?” said Matt, cringing away from the tool.

“I want to know what you’ve been reporting to Kylo Ren about my men,” said Hux.

Matt hadn’t been reporting anything. There had been nothing to report. His days had been so filled with the tiresome chores of a radar technician, that despite his every effort, Matt had so little time to spend infiltrating the stormtroopers. Even his attempts to connect with the troopers at meal times in the mess hall didn’t yield anything more than useless banter for Matt to report.

Matt could have told Hux that of course, it probably would have been wiser to do so. Instead Matt said through clenched, bared teeth, “I’m not telling you anything. I report to Kylo and no one else.”

Hux sneered, “Are you sure of that?” Matt looked into those green eyes, darkened to almost grey beneath the light and he saw the malice and barely contained fury in them and he found that, no, he wasn’t so sure of that. Knowing blind rage always boiling at the surface was so much a part of who Kylo was, Matt thought he knew fury. But the fury in Hux was different. It wasn’t boiling like Kylo’s it was simmering, and not at the surface but deep within, contained and controlled behind that mask of cold apathy. General Hux was a dangerous man, Matt realized then, perhaps even more dangerous than his powerful Kylo.

He swallowed to relieve his dry throat to no avail.

“I wonder, Clone, can you feel pain? Are you as human as you appear?” asked the General, he pressed the tool into Matt’s cheeks, adding just enough pressure for Matt to feel a discomfort, but it didn’t hurt, not yet.

Matt jerked forward against the bite of the metal restrains though, prompted not by physical pain, but by a hard, invisible punch to his chest when the General called him ‘Clone’. “Don’t call me that!” Matt snarled, to which the General only smirked.

“You don’t like that?” said Hux. “Why not? That’s what you are, Clone.” Hux pulled even closer to Matt, nearly pressing his forehead against Matt’s, and he brought up his other hand and grabbed ahold of Matt’s face. “Ren’s little Clone,” the General purred. “I had hoped you’d have a better sense of self-preservation than he does.” Hux’s nails dug into Matt’s face and he said, more harshly than before, “What have you been reporting to Ren about my men?”

Matt was trembling, and in his chest his heart raced. It might have been the first time in his life he’d experienced true fear, and he found himself wondering if fear was supposed to make him angry. For that was what rose from the terror, anger. If he had a single drop of saliva in his dried mouth, he might have spat it in Hux’s face, but he didn’t, so he spat words instead, “Do whatever you want to me, I won’t tell you anything.”

“Really?” said Hux, he brought that tool down, and Matt felt the pliers threatening to clamp down on his pointer and middle fingers, threatening to snap the bones in half.

“Go ahead,” said Matt. “Break them!”

“Break them?” said Hux. “No, Clone, this won’t just break your fingers, it’ll cut them off, and it won’t be a clean cut, it doesn’t have the strength for that. It’ll cut slowly, I’ll have to work it through your meat and bones. It might be a little unpleasant. Would you really endure that for Ren?”

“I’d die for him!” The words fell out of Matt’s mouth, uninhibited and unfiltered, because it was the truth. Matt would die for Kylo, there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for Kylo.

For a moment, something passed through Hux’s eyes, a brief respite of that glimmering malice, before those eyes froze over again.

Hux scoffed. “An idiotic statement, if ever I’ve heard one.”

The pressure around Matt’s fingers tightened and Matt braced himself against the pain. He wanted to close his eyes, squeeze them shut as though by not seeing he could escape the agony, but something in him told him to keep his eyes opened, so that he could look into the face of his mutilator.

So that’s what Matt did, stared into the General’s eyes, but the General wasn’t staring back. Instead Hux’s gaze had dropped to the feature just right below his nose—his mouth. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Hux’s thumb slid from the side of Matt’s face and brushed against Matt’s lower lips.

It wasn’t the first time the General had done that. Matt thought back to the first time they’d met, when Hux unexpectedly turned up in Kylo’s chambers and discovered Matt. He though back to the way Hux had grabbed his face and stroked his lips then too.

Something seemed to overtake the General and without meaning to, Matt found himself tiptoeing into Hux’s mind with his limited force abilities. And from the General’s mind Matt clearly hears two sharp, bitter words — _Fucking Ren_.

Matt didn’t understand it and his confusion grew as he watched the General’s resolve waver and then disappear completely. This concession came with no specific words in Hux’s mind, but Matt could sense the General’s feelings—disbelief at himself and a tinge of self-loathing that Hux wasn’t accustomed to; followed by deflated resignation. Those two words flowed from Hux’s mind again, _Fucking Ren,_ and then just like that, the General pulled back. The weight of Hux’s body against Matt’s lifted, and so did the warmth, leaving Matt feeling chilled in the uncomfortable interrogation bench.

Hux tossed the tool in his hand into the toolbox with perfect aim. He released the restraints around Matt’s wrists, and Matt stumbled away from the bench. He looked at his wrists and saw that they were red and raw then he looked up at Hux’s cold, smug face.

An urge to strike him came over Matt, and with nothing holding him back, Matt formed a fist and thrust his arm out towards the General’s face. His fist didn’t land quite where Matt intended…it didn’t really land anywhere at all in fact. Instead, it was caught by Hux with quiet amusement spreading across his face.

“You should know it’s a crime to strike me,” said Hux. “A worst fate than that chair awaits you if you do.”

Matt yanked his hand back; humiliated but no less angry.

“You’re loyal, Clone,” said Hux. “I can only hope my own men deserve my faith the way you deserve Ren’s.” Then he said, as an afterthought, “I suppose you’ll have to tell me if they don’t.” He laughed, but it was a hollow sound that told Matt he found no humor in the idea.

Hux swept the gloves up from the top of the bench, where they had remained while Matt was cuffed into the thing. Pulling them onto his hands, Hux turned and marched over to the blast door and entered the code to open it.

Just before he stepped into the corridor, he said over his shoulder, “Oh, and you’re welcome.”

“For what?” said Matt. He’d snarled the words, not caring about how Hux would react to the blatant insolence.

Hux seemed to choose not to react to it at all. “For saving your job,” he said as he walked off.

As Matt stood there rubbing the sore, swollen bands on his wrists, he should have seen the man General Hux was beneath his impeccable uniform and the handsome face. But then Matt had still been too naïve, too new to the world to fully grasp the intricacies of human nature and he had still been holding onto the notion he learned in his books that all living things were as good as they were evil.

It wasn’t until months later, after Hux’s defection from the First Order, and after Kylo woke from the bacta tank and Matt saw the damage Hux had done to Kylo that he learned that some people in the universe were simply evil.

Often Matt thinks back to that day that he returned to his chambers to find Kylo standing in his meditation chamber, starring numbly at the burnt melted mask of Darth Vader. A ragged, grotesque line was split across Kylo’s face. Matt remembers looking over Kylo, taking in the new scars on his body and noting with a certain dejection that all these changes to Kylo’s physical form made him look less like Kylo than he did before. But, he told himself, at least Kylo was back, scarred, but healed nonetheless. He discovered quickly that he was wrong, Kylo wasn’t back, Kylo was gone. Matt noticed it first in the emptiness in Kylo’s eyes, in the absence of that fervent glow Matt always saw in them.

When Kylo looked back at him, Matt barely recognized him. His voice was hoarse and as empty as his eyes when he said to Matt, “He betrayed me...he's gone” It was clear to Matt then, that just as Hux was gone, so was Kylo. Everything that Kylo was had left in the snow, abandoned by Hux and destroyed by Hux's betrayal.


	2. To Love is To Hate

The eldest boy, a child of six, is nursing at his mother’s tits, while the younger boy, a mere infant at two years old, sits in an elevated chair at the table squishing lumps of mashed peas with his fingers into the tray in front of him.

Hux’s narrows his eyes at the mess the infant is making, trying desperately to ignore the itch in his fingers to wipe the child clean.

“Mary,” Hux says when he could no longer bare the sight. “I think John has had enough, perhaps you should give Robbie your attention.”

The Widow Blackwood gazes up at him over the boy suckling at her breasts. “Yes, of course,” she says, shifting the reluctant boy away from her swollen tits. “Johnny, that’s enough.”

The child whined. “But I’m still hungry.”

The Widow Blackwood adjusts the sleeve of her dress, pulling it back up her shoulder before buttoning up the front. She pushes a plate of blackened bantha meat towards her son. “Have some of the meat your father brought home.”

 _Father,_ the word always feels like such a farce when Hux hears it being applied to himself, even more of a farce than the fake name he had taken on. He looks at the two boys, golden haired and brown eyed, with round faces and squished noses, though both of them called him “father”, he had fathered neither of them. And thank the universe for that, the children were miserable little shits.

No sooner had the scornful thought entered Hux’s mind did the eldest boy set out to affirm Hux’s sentiments. John’s face had turned as ripe as a tomato. He throws his head back and begins to shriek.

“I don’t like that food!” the child cries slamming his small fists on the already wobbly round table where they took their meals. “I don’t like it!”

“Johnny, stop it!” scolds Mary Blackwood with little conviction. “You don’t behave this way at the table.”

The boy’s eyes grows small and beady in his displeasure at the scolding from his mother and Hux sees what the boy is about to do. With his reflexes as quick as ever Hux stands, pushing his half eaten dinner aside, reaches across the table and grabs the boy before John’s small fits are able to strike his mother.

Hux pulls John towards him, bends down and looks him hard in the eye. “You do not hit your mother,” he says firmly.

The boy’s eyes widen with terror, and he quickly looks away in submission. Hux is reminded of his soldiers, the way they yielded to his authority when he dressed them down and yet, he got none of the satisfaction from the child’s acquiescence that he always got from his soldiers’.

“Apologize,” Hux demands.

With his head bowed, and his eyes casted downwards, John apologizes to his mother as he’s told.

“Good,” says Hux. “Now you’re done eating, leave the table, go to your room.”

Upon hearing that he would be getting nothing more to eat, John lifts his eyes to Hux’s and Hux sees them welling up with tears. But John does not refute him, Hux knows it is simply because he is too young to know how to, in a few years time the boy would not be so easy to control, and what a nightmare he will be.

Sniffing quietly, John walks out of the small, cramped space that served as both a kitchen and a dining room. When his footsteps disappeared down the hall, followed by the sound of a door slamming shut, the Widow Blackwood looks to Hux.

“He’s still hungry,” she says in disapproval.

“He’ll live,” Hux replies in irritation.

“You shouldn’t have done that. He’s not used to being treated that way; his father never—” Mary stops herself when she catches the hard look on Hux’s face.

She said that a lot, “His father never…” as though she thought Hux ought to care about the parenting skills of a dead man. Hux doesn’t care, not even a little. Disciplining the boy and teaching him proper respect was what his own father would have done and Hux always thought that if he had children of his own, he’d be the kind of father to them that his was to him.

Thinking of his father sent a hollow ache rumbling into Hux’s stomach and he wonders, not for the first time, whether or not they would ever see each other again. Hux doesn’t know what became of his father after he fled from the dying planet the day he lost everything. Had he been captured by Snoke? Was he still alive? Day after day Hux woke hoping to hear word of his father, or from the man himself, day after day he heard nothing but silence.

Hux gazes at his unfinished plate of charred meat and buttered vegetables with disinterest. His appetite is gone and he’s suddenly in want of a long shower and rest. He tells the Widow Blackwood as much, and heads for the door.

“Ben,” says the woman.

Hux stops.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“—It’s fine, Mary, think nothing of it.” Hux forces a small smile on his lips and he leans over and kisses the Widow Blackwood, or rather Mary Blackwood—as she was a widow no more after he had married her— on her forehead.

He leaves the kitchen and walks the short length of the hall in the small one story cottage that is now his home to the refresher at the end of the hall.

The refresher in the cottage had neither the space nor the refinement of the one Hux had in his chambers aboard the _Finalizer_. The shower was little more than a hose hung up on a latch in the wall with a drain in the ground while the sink was a bowl and a jug of water. And the place was filthy, cover in mold and mildew and clumps of mud trekked in by the children after their return from playing outdoors.

There was a time when Hux might have thought he wouldn’t survive living in such a condition. But Hux has found that despite the many times he caught himself nearly hyperventilating at the display of filth and grime and disarray that now surrounds his life, he is a survivor and survivors acclimatize to their surroundings. There are few things in this universe that could stand between him and his survival, so he adapted as best he could, and he wonders every day if he would have to live like this for the rest of his life.

Hux begins to remove his clothes when the sound of a soft mewing caught his attention. Hux turns to look at the source of his sound and found a plump orange cat lying out beneath the widow.

He smiles, a rare genuine smile, and walks over to the cat to scratch behind her ears. “So this is where you’ve been, little girl, I’ve been wondering.” The cat squeezes its round green eyes shut and begins to purr in delight at Hux’s touch. “Good girl,” Hux says. _Girl_ , that’s what he calls her now. It’d been a long time since Hux had called the cat by her name, Millicent. It was the name Ren had given her and he couldn’t say the name without thinking about him, so he avoided it altogether. Oftentimes Hux wished he could forget the man who ruined his life completely and never think of him again.

 _“I wonder, General, who would you be without the memories of me clinging to your every thought?”_ The voice is back, smug and mocking, Hux longs to smack it across the face.

“Perfectly happy is what I would be, Ren,” Hux growls under his breath. He begins to unbutton his shirt.

 _“Would you be though?”_ asks the voice.

“Yes,” says Hux and he wants to believe it, but in truth he knows that he would be lost without the memories of Ren to hold on to. Ren was everywhere to him, in his mind and on his body. He can’t even remove his clothes without triggering a memory of the man.

At that thought Hux turns his head and looks down at his shoulder and lifts a finger to stroke the shiny, jagged lump of healed flesh on the back of his arm. The memory of the day he got that scar pours in like flood gates opening and there he was on the _Finalizer_ , standing proud and mighty on his command deck as his ship made haste in the direction of the construction site of Starkiller Base.

And there was Ren storming in like a dark gust of acidic wind. Dangerous and imposing, making even the bravest of officers cower in his presence.

He rounded on Hux with his fists clenched and his shoulders taut, but his voice was chillingly controlled when he asked, “Why are we not on course to Jakku?”

Hux remembers rolling his shoulders back and drawing himself up in an attempt to make up for the few inches Ren had over him. Even then, it felt like a childish thing to do but there was always something about Ren that drew out in Hux a buried insecurity Hux never even knew existed within himself.

His voice was confident though when he spoke, of that Hux had made certain. “Because we’re not going to Jakku, Lord Ren.”

Ren tightened his clenched fists, betraying the ire he hid behind his mask. Hux remembers gazing down at the knight’s gloved hands and seeing the way the leather pulled at the seams, and thinking what a terrible waste of an exquisite pair of gloves it would be if they did tear. “Have you forgotten your orders, General?”

“No, Lord Ren, I have not forgotten my orders,” said Hux. “I was ordered to oversee the construction of the Starkiller Base.”

“You were also ordered to find the map to Skywalker.”

“Yes,” said Hux. “And I will, after the base.”

“The one carrying the map will be on Jakku in two days time.” Kylo’s voice pushed out of the mask in tight, short rasps.

“According to you,” said Hux.

“You doubt my visions?”

“I don’t doubt your visions,” said Hux smoothly. “I just don’t trust them enough to allow them to override my own plans.” In truth, Hux trusted Ren’s visions more than anything else he’d ever trusted in his life, but finding the map to Skywalker was only in the interest of Snoke, whereas the construction of the Starkiller Base was in Hux’s own interest.

“And what plans would those be, General?”

“My other orders, Lord Ren,” said Hux, “to oversee the construction of the Starkiller Base.”

“That base is not more important than the map to Skywalker.”

“It is just as important. It may not be to you, but it is for the cause,” said General Hux. “I know consideration for others isn’t in your nature, Ren, but if you can’t see past your selfishness and recognize what’s good for the Order on your own, there’s nothing I can do to help you.”

Even with his mask on Hux noted the minuscule change in Ren’s body as he became tense with anger, and Hux knew his words had gone too far.

“I’m selfish?” Ren snarled and there came a sudden strain against Hux’s throat. “You’re not one to speak of selfishness, General.”

Hux gripped his neck with his hands, desperately wishing to pry away the invisible hands that were closing in around his throat. He glared at Ren, hating him then. It was one thing for the knight to lash out at him with his powers when they were alone, but on the bridge, before the eyes of Hux’s officers, it was another thing entirely, and Hux would not stand for it.

What happened next Hux should have foreseen. His officers rose gathering around Ren. On their faces were barely suppressed looks of apprehension or blatant fear, but still one by one they drew their side blasters, pointing it at Ren’s back. Hux would think, in retrospect, that he should feel esteemed by the testimony of loyalty from his men that they would raise their weapons to Kylo Ren for him, but at the time, all Hux felt was terror. It was fear like Hux had never felt before, fear and inexplicable anger at the sight of dozens of blasters aimed at Ren’s back.

“Stand down!” Hux rasped franticly against the strain at his neck. The officers hesitated, which only drove the anger deeper into Hux’s core. “I said stand down, that’s an order!”

Just as swiftly as those weapons were drawn, one by one, they were lowered, one by one…save for a single newly inducted trooper who happened to have been on the command deck to deliver a message when everything began. He had his sidearm gripped between shaking hands, clearly frozen on the spot.

“Stand down, solider,” Hux said thickly. “I am ordering you to—”

Before Hux could finish his sentence, a series of events happened in too quick a succession for Hux to make sense of. He heard the whirling of the sidearm blaster being discharged and a flash of light coming his way.

And then he hears Ren scream, “No!” The sound was strained and tormented through the amplifier of the mask.

The invisible hold on Hux’s neck released instantly, followed by a shooting pain tearing into his arm. Hux stumbled backwards into a control panel.

Officers rushed to him, as Hux stared in shock at the blood soaking through the torn fabric of his uniform. From the frantic commentary on what had just occurred, Hux was able to discern through the ensuing chaos that the blaster fired from the shaky hands of the anxious trooper had been aimed at his head, but Ren had deflected it saving Hux from a very final fate. He looked up and there was Ren, standing exactly where he had been, looking stoic and composed in the mask, but the way the knight’s chest heaved visibly coupled with the way Ren was clenching and unclenching both his fists, told a different story. Inexplicably Hux wanted to reach out to Ren, even with blood pouring out from his wound, while officers swarmed him, Hux wanted to reach out for Ren, and pull the knight towards him. Did he need the man for comfort after the traumatic ordeal, is that what it was for fucks sake?

Hux wasn’t given the opportunity to fully decipher his feelings before he was hoisted up by two officers who intended to carry him to the Medbay. He saw Ren turn on the heels of his heavy boots and disappear from the command deck.

“I can walk to Medbay on my own,” Hux said, once Ren was gone. “Lieutenant Mitaka, turn this ship around, and head for Jakku.”

***

Matt likes to wander the city sometimes, he likes to take long walks through Old Town, where old shops that had been abandoned when the war touched this planet, remained relatively undisturbed; a relic of better times. Matt imagines this city was beautiful once, as was the entire planet with it’s blue skies and indigo seas and the ancient, stone structures the depicted the architecture of it’s diverse group of people.

Matt can see why Hux had chosen this place to build his capitol. In the last year Matt had more time alone than he’d ever had, and, such was his way, he spent that time reading. He studied warfare and economics and politics and ancient history and he learned that this planet with its infinite natural resources that strengthen them in trade, had always been economically stable and therefore a epicenter of political power. Hux is clever, very clever, and Snoke more so, for making good use of that cleverness. Look at them now, Snoke and Hux, which of the two became the Emperor?

Matt had been thinking about Hux a lot of late. He’s not truly sure when he came to the conclusion that Hux was the last hope for Kylo’s salvation he only knows that he does and that he’d find Hux if he could.

As Matt walks the sky begins to darken. He’s miles away from the palace and he knows it’s unsafe to wander the streets alone at night in these times. He turns a corner to a back alley route that he knows will get him back to the palace faster.

He walks past several people in the street with no homes to go to. They’re huddled in the corner trying to keep warm as the evening grows cold. Matt tries to keep his eyes forward, so as not to acknowledge them, though he feels a shard of guilt and shame at his actions.

 _You can’t help them anyway_ , he tells himself as he goes on his way.

He is still a ways from the palace, but he can see it in the distance, the dark sandstone structure looming over the decrepit city. The sunlight is fading fast, faster than Matt can walk. He shouldn’t be out here.

 _“_ You’ll be fine,” Matt says quietly under his breath, _“just keep walking.”_

Just as he says this he sees a band of men, dressed in ragged clothing, begin to approach him. Instinctively, Matt folds his arms over his chest, to cover the Imperial First Order insignia sewn onto the right side of his vest. But it’s too late, they’ve probably seen it before Matt even noticed that, and that was what had drawn them to him.

“It’s a bit late for you to be wandering out here alone, Little Lord,” says one of the men, a burly blond with grimy hair.

Matt looks around and sees that he’s surrounded by the man’s friends.

“I’m just trying to get back,” says Matt.

“Back to the palace, you mean?” says the burly blond. “Back to the Emperor?”

“No!” says Matt. What he wanted to say was that he’s not one of them, he wanted to tell the men that he’s not one of the people responsible for their suffering.

It’s been a common occurrence in the last several months— servants in the palace have gone out at night and are found dead in the morning. Their bodies are always dropped on the front steps of the palace completely mutilated. It’s the people on the streets who were responsible for the killings, the people who’ve suffered under the new Imperial rule, and for some reason those people have convinced themselves that killing helpless servants was justice for the Emperor’s crimes.

“Don’t worry, Little Lord, we can get you back to your Emperor,” says the burly blond. He looks to his friends, “Won’t we?”

A boy with orange skin and red eyes, who’s little more than a child, smirks and sneers, and begins to draw a blade out from his back pocket. “I say we gut him before we send him back to the Emperor.”

Matt’s heart begins to pound. He looks at the angry faces surrounding him. There are five; all of them with matching looks of contempt in their eyes. They hate him. No, not him, they hate the Imperial First Order and at the moment, Matt was the Imperial First Order. “I know you’re angry,” says Matt quickly. “I know you want justice, but this isn’t it. Killing innocent servants isn’t justice, it’s murder.”

“Murder, huh?” says the burly blond. “And what do you call the thing the Emperor and his Imperial First dogs do to our friends and our families?”

 _That’s also murder_ , Matt wants to say, but he doesn’t; saying it would be treason.

“The people you’ve been killing had nothing to do with any of that,” says Matt. “They have no say in what the Emperor does; they’re as helpless in this war as you are!”

But Matt’s efforts are in vain as the burly blond merely smiles and nods to one of them standing behind Matt. “Grab him,” he says, pulling out a blade of his own.

Matt feels strong arms wrap around him and pull him backwards, and suddenly he’s on the ground with the gang of men descending upon him with makeshift weapons they’ve pulled from their pockets.

Matt screams but he doesn’t beg. He feels a fist slam into his stomach, and he lurches forward in response to the pain that drives through him all the way to his groin. Matt wraps his arms over his head and tries to shield himself from the next blow. He continues to scream until one of them says, “Shut him up, slit his throat.”

Matt feels his hair being grabbed, he bites down against the pain of the pulling at his scalp as his head is pulled back to expose his neck.

 _At least it’ll be swift,_ Matt thinks. It could be worse, they could drag on the torment and keep him alive all the while so that he’ll feel the pain. But these men are not looking to torture; they are simply looking for retribution for their own pains. If Matt thought his death might bring the justice they seek, he might find some peace in that but he knows his death will be meaningless.

Matt feels the blade against his neck and he closes his eyes, and stops his screaming. He waits for it, braces himself for what’s to come, when he hears it—the swish and buzzing of a lightsaber!

Matt feels the weight of the men holding him to the ground lift off of him one by one; he hears screaming and the sound of footsteps trying to run away. Matt opens his eyes to furious red light slashing into the dark alleyway. Something warm and sticky splashes against his face. Matt tries to pick himself up from the ground, against the excruciating pain beating into his body. He lifts only his head and sees the dark shape of Kylo with his robes flying as he spun through the alleyway with his lightsaber, thrashing it’s blade through the bodies of Matt’s assailant.

 _No don’t kill them!_ Matt wanted to scream, but he knows it’ll be no use; Kylo won’t listen.

Matt sees the last body drop heavily to the ground and he looks around—all five of the men are dead. Matt’s eyes fall on the burly blond, lying on his stomach just a few feet away, the man’s eyes are open and his gaze is empty as he stares back at Matt with a pool of blood gathering around his mouth. Matt looks away; overtaken by a sadness he cannot shake. Yes he knows the men had tried to kill him, and he knows he’s only alive now because they are dead, but still he mourns them. They only wanted justice, and they thought this was the way to get it. It’s not their fault. He recalls a line from one of the books he’s read: _Evil begets evil, and the innocent dies, until there is innocence no more._

 _Yes, evil begets evil._ Matt looks up at Kylo who has switched off his lightsaber and clipped it back on his belt. He walks up to Matt, kneels down, and Matt can sense him. He can’t see Kylo behind the mask, but he can sense his feelings—anger and fear, and worry, for Matt, emotions that were all unsanctioned by Snoke, and Kylo doesn’t know what to do with any of it.

Matt reaches up, and puts his hands on Kylo’s masked face, and Kylo allows it.

 _It’s a change,_ Matt thinks. The fact that Kylo is here at all, acting on his own, no doubt, not under orders from Snoke, is a surprising change reminiscent of his old self. Hope begins to wash through him.

Matt thinks back to a few nights ago, to the first time he felt the stirring of Kylo’s old self inside of him. Kylo had been dreaming, and the dream had slipped into Matt’s mind and woken him up. It had been a long time since Matt has felt Kylo dream. In the year that’s passed, Kylo had been as empty in his sleep as he was awake—like a machine that was turned when needed and off when not. Machines don’t dream, and neither did Kylo. But that night, Matt felt it, Kylo was dreaming, and it was of Hux.

The images had transferred into Matt’s mind in flashes of blurred memories. They were memories of General Hux, standing on the bridge of the _Finalizer_ smoking a cigarette, it changed to memories of Kylo sitting side by side with Hux on the observation deck. Hux was looking up at Kylo, green eyes twinkling as he held out a cigarette and said, “Remove your mask, please.”

And then another memory, the two of them alone, in a dark room and Hux is running his hands through Kylo’s hair. Matt felt Kylo longing for Hux, he felt Kylo reaching into the Force, desperately searching for Hux, desperately trying to reach out to him, but he wakes before he could find him.

In the morning Kylo had been disoriented and confused, but at least there was something in him, and Matt at seen a spark of life in Kylo’s eyes. Matt hadn’t allowed himself to hope then, out of fear that Kylo would fade once more into that lifeless shell he’s become.

But now, Matt wonders, as Kylo lifts him off the ground and carries him back towards the palace. Now he wonders if there might be hope.

He thinks of Hux. The man is out there somewhere and if he’s out there than perhaps there was hope for Kylo, perhaps if Matt can find Hux and bring him back, he can save Kylo.

***

Mary is sitting on the old, battered mattress they used as a bed in the room they shared, waiting for Hux when he is finished with his shower. Hux looks at the woman smiling placating up at him as he pushes the door closed behind him. She is a comely woman, with soft golden hair and frail features, but the skin around her eyes were always sagging with exhaustion and unshakeable sadness. It aged her, the sadness and the exhaustion, which was a shame, Hux often thinks, for the woman could have been a true beauty.

“Ben, what I said to you at dinner tonight, I should not have said it,” Mary says softly.

“You didn’t say anything at all,” Hux says, walking over to the mattress.

“Only because you stopped me,” Mary replies.

Hux sits down beside her on the bed. “I told you to think nothing more of it.”

“I can’t.” Mary gazes down at her hands. “I shouldn’t compare you to him, it’s unfair of me, I know.”

Hux shakes his head, his eyes fixed on an ugly patch of yellow discoloring the wall from water damage. “You loved him,” says Hux. “I don’t expect you to forget him easily.” There was a time when Hux might have uttered those very same words and colored them with faux understanding and empty empathy, but now, as Hux speaks, he catches himself wondering if he might have been speaking about himself.

He hears Mary breath a deep, broken sigh. Her voice is hollow when she speaks again. “It’s a terrible thing to lose the one you love more than life itself. I suppose you know what that’s like.”

“Do I?”

From the corner of his eyes Hux sees Mary turn to face him, and he feels her eyes bearing into his. “You get this look in your eyes sometimes when you think no one is watching. I know that look, it’s the one you have when you know that you’ve lost a great love you don’t think you’ll ever get back.”

“Love,” Hux echoes, tasting the word on his lips, trying to apply it to himself. Hux knows he can love, of course, he’s human. He loves his father after all, but it was a different kind of love, not the one Mary meant, not that all-encompassing love that devours you and destroys you, not the kind that made a person willing to sacrifice his own life for. Hux thinks of Ren, as much as he loathed himself for it, he thinks of Ren. “How closely do you think love can be linked with hate?”

“Like most things, love is different for everyone. For me, not close at all, but I don’t think I’ve ever known hate before, not truly, not for anyone. For you though, I think love and hate might be one and the same at times.”

The corner of Hux’s lips quirk and forms into a humorless smile; then he chuckles, and looks at the woman, “You’re a clever girl, Mary Blackwood; you can do so much better than me.”

Mary returns his smile. Hux looks deeply into those dark sad eyes, and he remembers why he married her. It was because of those eyes, eyes that reminded him so much of Ren’s. He reaches a hand and runs his fingers through her golden hair, it was soft like Ren’s, though much longer. Hux leans over and presses a kiss on her lips, which were thinner than Ren’s. She folds into the kiss, and returns it, and they both close their eyes as they push into each other, letting their minds escape to memories of the past, memories of other people who were not each other.

For Hux it was, as always, a memory of Ren.

In the memory, it’s nighttime aboard the _Finalizer,_ the night following the incident aboard the command deck.

Hux was sitting on the ground in the _Finalizer’s_ enormous kitchen with his back propped up against a stove. Looking at his own reflection through the shiny metal of the oven across from him, he sees how unlike himself he looks. He was disheveled with his usually meticulously kept hair in disarray around his face, like the petals of a wilting orange flower drooped over, clinging on to its last drop of life. His uniform was unbuttoned and wrinkled as it hung loosely around his undershirt. He looked like a sad vagabond; half drunk with his right hand clutching a large bottle of nearly finished alcohol. He looks pathetic, which was just as well too, for pathetic was how he felt.

He was in the act of bringing that bottle of alcohol to his mouth when the sound of approaching footsteps stopped him. The owner of the footsteps marched purposefully towards him and stopped even more purposefully in front of him, towering over him.

Hux lifted his misty eyes up the length of the tall black figure and smiled sheepishly at Kylo Ren’s masked face. “Ren,” he said lifting his nearly empty bottle in the air like he was making a toast. “Come to join this little party of mine?”

“No,” said Ren, his voice crisp behind the mask.

“Shame,” Hux slurred, taking a swig from his bottle. “Why, then, have you come to grace me with your presence?”

“You’ve been scolding me for the past two hours, it was getting annoying,” Ren replied.

Hux let out a loud, uncharacteristic snort. In Hux’s alcohol muddled mind, the sentence sounded funny being delivered in that mechanically altered voice. “It’d be a lot less annoying if you were a normal person who didn’t help himself to the private thoughts of others.”

Ren bent down, leveling himself with Hux. He brought his face close to Hux’s so that they might have been looking each other in the eye if it weren’t for Ren’s mask. “This is pathetic, General,” he said.

Hux angled his neck, looking sideways at Ren, as though he’d see the man better from that angle. “You’re angry with me,” he said after a time.

“You don’t say,” said Ren.

Hux made a noise that was meant to be a grunt of acknowledge. “I guess I deserve it…and I deserve, this—” he gestured with his free hand to where the bandage of the flesh wound on his arm bulked out. “Ironic, really,” he said dryly. “We’re at war, and of all the ways to get shot, I got shot by my own man, on my own command deck, over a scrabble with you. Not exactly the stuff of legends, is it?”

Air emitted out of Ren’s mask that sounded an awful lot like a sigh, but in truth could have been anything at all, before he said sharply, “Get up.”

Hux rolled his head over to look back at Ren, and he felt as though he was attempting to drag something incredibly heavy with the fragile muscles on his neck. “Take off your mask,” he said without meaning to, the words simply rolled out of his mouth.

“Hux…” Ren said and Hux _so_ wished he could see Ren’s face when he said his name.

“Please…”

“Get up, Hux.”

“You did it for me the last time I asked,” Hux pointed out, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

Ren’s shoulders tensed at the reminder of Hux’s deception, and Hux braced himself for the worst. But, after only a brief pause, Ren simply said, yet again, “Just get up.”

Hux ignored the command, dropping his chin to his chest, and stared forward at nothing in particular. “You’ve won, Ren,” he mumbled dismally.

The tension rose, and even through the steady calm of the mask, Hux heard it in Ren’s voice. “That’s exactly what I said to you.”

“It is. I’m quoting you,” said Hux. “And you were wrong when you said it. I didn’t win anything at all by breaking my promise to you. I never wanted to hurt you.”

Another puff of air snapped sharp and harsh out of the mask, sounding remarkably derisive. “You never do anything you don’t intend to do.”

“You’re right, I don’t,” said Hux. “I absolutely _intended_ to hurt you when I broke my promise…that doesn’t mean I _wanted_ to hurt you.”

For a long moment Ren stood still, frozen like a sculpture, looming over Hux. His inner turmoil was so strongly etched in the lines of his body that even half inebriated, even without Ren’s dirty tricks to sense the thoughts of others through the Force, Hux felt Ren’s harsh emotions.

Eventually Ren decided to lift that mask off his head. His full, shiny hair fanned out around his face, and unable to control himself, Hux stared up like a schoolboy laying eyes on his first crush.

“There he is!” Hux exclaimed with a celebratory wave of his hand, as Ren dropped the mask to the floor.

Ren ignored the exclamation. He looked intently at Hux and said, with hard eyes and a tight voice, “Don’t go to Jakku if it makes you miserable. Turn this ship around and go see to your precious Starkiller Base if it means this much to you.”

Hux snorted as inelegantly as before. “You think I’m miserable because of a slight change in course? You discredit me, Lord Ren. I’m more adaptable than that.” His tipped his head back and overfilled his mouth with the biting liquor. Drops of alcohol escaped from the corner of his lips, leaking messily down his chin as he gargled the liquor down the back of his throat. Upon swallowing his last gulp, he said, with flushed cheeks and glassy-eyes, “Turns out the only thing capable of making me miserable is you.”

“Me?” said Ren and Hux couldn’t decipher if the look on his face was indignation or simply astonishment.

“If you’re surprised to hear that, imagine my own shock when I figured it out,” said Hux, feeling indeed very miserable. “I thought I could live with the idea of you hating me. Turns out I can’t.” Hux lifted the bottle once more, but just as it reached his mouth this time, Ren’s hand caught it mid-pour.

“Stop.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ve had enough.”

“Not nearly enough,” Hux drawled, keeping a stubborn hold on that bottle like a man clinging on for dear life.

Ren let out a deep exhale. “At least don’t do it out here. Let me take you back to your chambers.”

“I don’t wanna,” said Hux, sounding more childish than he’s ever sounded in his life; including when he actually was a child.

“Hux, any minute somebody could walk by and see you like this,” Ren said. There was a measured tenderness in his voice, like one attempting to reason with a particularly temperamental infant.

“Wouldn’t want that now would we?” said Hux. “People might start to question my ability to lead.” He barked out a short, empty laugh. “Wouldn’t that be something? The Fall of General Hux—shot and disgraced all in one day. I might get demoted, or worse, deemed unfit for service and dismissed completely.” Hux pried the bottle from Ren’s grip and lifted it into the air and the amber liquid at the bottom of the bottle swashed in Hux’s unsteady hand. “Here’s to the General they promote in my stead, may you hate him so much less.”

Ren’s demeanor hardened. “You think this is hate?”

Hux glanced down to the wound on his arm. “Well it sure as hell isn’t love.”

“That weapon was aimed at your skull,” said Ren tersely. “If it was hate, I’d have let it hit its mark.”

Hux scoffed and said sardonically, “Well that’s something I guess.”

“What else do you want from me?” Ren’s voice faltered but his features were wiped clean of any emotions that might betray him. “Do you want me to tell you how I felt when that dimwitted officer accidentally discharged the weapon that was aimed at your head? Do you want me to tell you how much I loathed the fact that what happened to you today was my fault? Do you want me to tell you how I actually contemplated throwing myself in its line of fire if I couldn’t stop it or redirect it? Is that what you want to hear?”

Hux, pink faced and cloudy eyed, sat, staring at Ren, looking positively at a loss for words.

“No of course you don’t,” said Ren, a hint of bitterness colored his words, “that’s not what you want from me. You don’t want me to be willing to die for you; you just want me to be willing to spread my ass open before you so you can fuck me from behind.”

“Ren—” Hux began.

“—Tell me I’m wrong,” Ren dared him. “Tell me that isn’t what you think about every time you’re near me. You think I don’t know? You think I don’t feel you watching me?”

Ren pulled himself closer to Hux. He lowered his voice and through hooded lids and thick lashes he looked at Hux, and breathed, “You think I don’t see you imagining how it feels to be inside of me? Or I don’t feel you wanting to run your hands through my hair, like this…” Ren pushed his fingers through the locks of Hux’s hair, sending a pleasurable sensation through Hux and Hux weakened to his touch.

Ren brought himself so completely against Hux’s body, the heat of him shot through the fabric of Hux’s clothes, rushing over Hux’s flesh. Ren’s voice grew soft and silky as he whispered tantalizing words in to Hux’s ears. “You think I don’t see you wanting to feel my lips against yours?” Ren brushed his wet lips over Hux’s, and the hot breath, the taste of Ren’s mouth on his, filled Hux’s body with an insatiable ache.

“Well let me show you what it’d be like,” Ren purred. With that he pushed his mouth against Hux’s with so much fervor Hux’s head slammed backwards against the side of the stove. Ren’s tongue pried Hux’s lips apart, delving so deeply down his throat it almost choked him and Hux reveled in it, feeling every fiber in his body relinquishing itself to Ren’s mercy.

Hux’s hands clumsily grabbed for Ren’s ass, but Ren reached back, without pulling away from the kiss, grabbed Hux’s hands away and pinned them to the side.

Hux voiced his displeasure with a noise that sounded like a mix between a grunt and a moan, but he allowed it, distracted by Ren suddenly tearing his mouth away from his. Ren moved to his neck, pressed his mouth into Hux’s tender throat, marking him with a violent kiss.

Hux felt the soft, moist lips and hard teeth against his skin and his eyes fluttered shut as he shuttered and whimpered against the intoxicating mix of pain and pleasure.

Hux was reeling, wishing this would never end but just as soon as his thoughts pushed that wish into existence, it ended.

Without warning, Ren broke away. He pushed his body off of Hux’s and stood up. Casually, as though they had been engaged in nothing more than a light conversation that had naturally come to an end, Ren lifted his mask off the floor and stepped away.

Hux was disorientated from the rush of being so close to Ren, of having him—nearly having him at last. He felt faint from the blood that filled his head and dizzy from his unsatisfied hunger mixing with the alcohol flowing in his bloodstream.

He peered up at Ren, dazed and confused and froze at the coldness in Ren’s eyes.

“You should have kept your promise, General,” Ren said, and reality came crashing down on Hux, as it struck him that all of this had been nothing more than Ren’s retaliation.

Hux wondered if this had been premeditated, he had to commend Ren if it was, it was something he himself might have done.

Hux exhaled a soft mirthless laugh and tore his eyes away from Ren, unable to look at that frosty gaze for a second longer. “It’s as I said before Ren, you’ve won.”

The memory fades to the sound of Mary moaning as she comes. She’s sprawled on her stomach, face buried into the pillow, while Hux continues to push himself deeper into her from behind. He keeps his eyes squeezed shut, he’s moments from release when suddenly, from the room beside theirs a piercing scream cuts through the wall. It’s John.

Hux opens his eyes, and feels Mary moving to pull away from him. The screams grow louder.

Mary looks at Hux apologetically. “I have to go check on him. Can you finish on your own?”

Hux sighs internally, while he nods and pulls out. He hides his annoyance as Mary leaves the room, but inside he’s fuming at what his life has become. He can’t even have a fuck without being interrupted by the sound of a child’s tantrum. Hux never imagined this would be his life, but it is, and it’s all because of Ren.

 ***

The pub is dark and crowded with Imperial First Order? Officers’ lounging on high backed chairs lined with animal hide. There’s the scent of stale sweat mingling with the alcohol in the air.

Matt looked around the place, at all the unfamiliar faces; none looked up when he walked in. He walks over to bar and says to a blue skinned twi’lek tending it, “Excuse me, but do you now where I can find Larid Kassian?”

The twi’lek, who had been twisting a towel into an empty glass to dry it, glances up at him. “No one here by that name,” she says.

“Are you sure? How do you know?” Matt replies.

She scowls at him, as though offended and it occurs to Matt only then that perhaps his response had been rude. “Every customer who comes to this pub is a regular and I know every regular here by name; there’s no one here by the name of Larid Kassian.”

 _That can’t be right_ , Matt thinks. “You don’t understand, I was sent here to receive a package from Larid Kassian. Kylo Ren himself sent me.” That wasn’t entirely true, Kylo hadn’t directly instructed him to come here. In fact, he had been cornered by a messenger boy earlier that morning who said to him, “I have a message for you from Lord Ren, he wants you to go to the Fat Maiden’s Pub this afternoon at fifteen hundred hours to receive a package for him from Larid Kassian.”

“The Fat Maiden’s?” Matt had said, slightly baffled by the message. Kylo rarely sent him on errands. “You mean the pub the officers like to go to at the edge of town?”

“Yes,” said the boy. “Fifteen hundred hours. Remember.”

The twi’lek balks slightly at the mention of Kylo’s name and she casts her eyes down at the glass in her hand, twisting the towel harder into the already dried cup. “No one here by that name, you might be at the wrong pub,” she merely replies.

Matt was about to tell the twi’lek he is certain that he’s not at the wrong pub. The Fat Maiden was where he had been told to go; Matt remembers that distinctly for the pub’s infamous reputation of turning proud Imperial First Order officers into drunken idiots in the middle of the day, on a daily basis.

Before he had the opportunity to open his mouth however, he hears someone call to him. “You there at the bar.”

Matt wheels around.

“You’re that radar technician aren’t you?” says a tall, broad shouldered woman with short blonde hair who was sitting alone in a booth. Matt recognized her, but only by face. He’d never spoken to her before.

“I was,” says Matt.

The woman smiles at him. “What’s your name?”

Matt pushes a finger to awkwardly adjust the glasses on the bridge of his nose. “Matt.”

“Join me, won’t you, Matt?” she gestures a hand that is tightly clutching a glass of amber colored liquid to the empty seat in the booth across from her.

Matt is hesitant, he still has to find the man named Larid Kassian and retrieve that package for Kylo, he doesn’t have time to sit and socialized. But Matt knows it would be disparaging to refuse the woman for she is a General of the Imperial First Order, the very General who had replaced Hux after he defected.

Matt walked over to the General, General Phasma, who’s fast and impressive rise through the ranks was legendary for surpassing even Hux’s. She’s sitting with her booted feet propped up on the table, while leaning back with a slight slump in her seat. She has none of Hux’s elegance and refinement, nor his coldness.

She smiles brighter at Matt and gestures for him to take a seat.

“Would you care for a drink?” she asks Matt as he sits.

“N-no,” Matt says feeling very odd and out of place. Too timid to look at her face, Matt looks, instead, to the bottom of her boots at the worn out soles that are crusted with dirt. “No thank you,” Matt thought he should add, and then amends once more, “No thank you s-sir--ma’am.”

General Phasma raises two fingers up from her cup and calls to the twi’lek, “Trinny, won’t you bring a glass of pale ale for my friend?”

“Yes, General,” Trinny replied. “Right away ma’am.”

The General turns her attention back on to Matt and lifts her cup to her lips and takes a sip. She swallows loudly before she says, “It’s a warm day today isn’t it?”

“Yes…” Matt says. “I guess.” He didn’t understand why General Phasma would sit him down just to talk about the weather. Perhaps she’s lonely, Matt thinks, though from what he’s seen of her, it never appears to be the case. He’s never seen her alone before, even when off duty. She was always surrounded by officers; though she out-ranked them she had a natural ease with them; an affability that might have even been true friendship. She wasn’t like Hux who always made a point of standing apart from his underlings, standing above them like a God, unapproachable and untouchable.

“I myself prefer the cold, this heat is an absolute nightmare for me—thank you Trinny,” General Phasma pushes the glass the twi’lek had just brought across the table to him, crushing over a small clump of dirt that had fallen from the General’s shoes onto the table. “How about you, how do you like the heat, Matt?”

_“Can you hear me?”_

Matt nearly jumped out of his seat. He shoots his eyes up to look at Phasma, wondering if he had imagined it.

 _“Yes,”_ Matt replies in his head. _“I can hear you.”_

_“Finally. I’ve been trying to get you to hear me since you walked through the door. I was beginning to think I was wrong about you, that you don’t have Kylo Ren’s gifts after all. Answer the question I just asked out loud. We need to keep up appearances.”_

“Uh…I…the heat’s okay,” Matt stutters quickly.

 _“Were you the one who sent the messenger boy?”_ Matt asks, putting it all together.

 _“Yes_ ,” says Phasma. “ _I was. Tell me, Matt, do you have a good memory.”_

 _“Yes. I think so,”_ says Matt _,_ wondering why that mattered _._

 _"_ Drink up,” Phasma says out loud. “It’s the best ale you’ll ever taste.”

 _“Good,”_ she says into Matt’s mind. _“I need you to remember these numbers.”_ She pushes a series of numbers into Matt’s brain.

Matt frowns at her in confusion. Was he supposed to know what they meant?

_“Can you remember them?”_

_“Yes.”_

Phasma nods. “What did I say? That’s good ale, isn’t it?”

Into Matt’s mind she says, _“When Commandant Hux was being dragged to his execution he grabbed me when he was led past me and said those very same numbers to me along with the words, ‘Remember.’ I knew instantly that they were coordinates.”_

Hearing that, Matt straightened up. _“Coordinates?”_

 _“Yes,”_ says Phasma. _“Coordinates to where we can find his son.”_

_“General Hux?”_

Out loud, Phasma made another insignificant statement, something about the quality of the snacks at the bar. _“I’ve been watching you Matt and I know that you’ve been looking for someone who can save your beloved Kylo Ren and you know as well as I do that the only person who can do that is Hux.”_

Matt swallows, feeling strange to hear his own private thoughts being voiced by someone else. He wonders if perhaps it’s General Phasma who was the one with the Force sensitivity and not the other way around. _“How do you know so much about me?”_ asks Matt. Most don’t even know he exists.

_“That’s not important right now. What is important is that Kylo Ren isn’t the only person who needs saving; we all do. This galaxy is suffering under Emperor Snoke’s rule. General Hux, despite everything that he might be, is the only person in this galaxy who can save us all.”_

_“But why are you giving me the coordinates?”_ asks Matt.

_“Because, you’re the one who’s going to bring him home.”_

Matt bristles. _“Why me?”_

 _“Because you look like Kylo Ren,”_ says Phasma matter-of-factly _. “And you might be the only person who can convince him to return. There will be a shuttle waiting for you tonight, along the east bridge.”_

Matt sits, feeling overwhelmed and uncertain about all of this. He isn’t so confident he could convince Hux of anything; but if there was even a small chance that Hux could save Kylo, Matt knows he has to try. _“I don’t know how to fly a shuttle.”_

_“Well, you better learn, fast. We’re all counting on you Matt. We need Hux and we need you to bring him back.”_


	3. Past Becomes Present

It’s night once more. This is Hux’s life now, night and day passing by in blurs of wasted hours. Devoid of his ambitions his life has become meaningless and unproductive. He simply lives and not much more. It’s miserable.

Mary and the children are asleep and Hux sits alone at the kitchen table with Millicent sleeping at his feet. His body is trembling slightly and there’s a dull nausea in his stomach; the echoes of nicotine withdrawal. It’s been exactly three-hundred-and-fifty-eight days and twelve hours since he smoked his last cigarette. The withdrawals he experienced at the beginning had made his body feel as though it was being crushed beneath the weight of a Star Destroyer, he’d never known physical agony like that before. Now, the symptoms were mere whispers of discomfort and sometimes Hux wonders if they were symptoms or simply the phantoms of past pains. Whether the discomfort was physical or mental, Hux distracts himself from it by fiddling with the knob of an old wooden radio, trying to pick up voices through the static in the hopes of hearing something through the buzzing that might give him a hint of his father’s whereabouts.

In earlier months, when Hux had first found the radio sitting beneath dust and dirt and cobwebs, he’d been able to pick up a few pieces of information. He knows that Snoke had seized power and is now Emperor, he knows that the Imperial First Order’s influences has grown more and more powerful by the day, as a series of political maneuvers forced even the most resilient of planets to bend the knees to the new Galactic Empire. The radio had given Hux just enough information to taunt him before it stopped working altogether.

The destruction of the Hosnian System devastated the New Republic so mercilessly that those remaining systems still holding to New Republic values were weakened and left without leadership. In their fear and their desperation to maintain political strength and economic stability, the leaders of those planets that once bowed to the New Republic, shifted alliances, giving Snoke the backing he needed to become Emperor.

Everything Snoke has done to gain power, to win his throne, had been play by play the very plans Hux had carefully drafted out for himself. They were plans Hux had kept safe for years, never written out on paper, but stored carefully in his mind, for that was the only place where others could not pry.

Others who weren’t Ren, that is. In all his careful planning Hux never accounted for the possibility that Kylo Ren could tear into his mind and steal away his destiny and hand it to Snoke.

But Ren did, and for Hux’s carelessness and oversight, this miserable life is his punishment.

_“I told you not to do it,”_ comes the sound of Ren’s voice in Hux’s head.

Hux scoffs at the voice and shoots back, _“Fuck load of good that did.”_

_Well it’s not his fault you didn’t listen_ , comes a dark voice, not Ren’s, but his own. Though Hux was loathe to admit it, he knows that the voices ware right, Ren did in fact tell him not to go through with his plan to seize power from Snoke, and he did in fact _choose_ not to listen. Not a day goes by that Hux didn’t think about that night he returned to his chambers to find Ren waiting for him. It was late, mere days away from the scheduled detonation of the Starkiller weapon, which meant many late nights and early mornings. When destiny calls, one doesn’t waste time on sleep. Those days, Hux was rarely in his own chambers, however it was by sheer luck, or perhaps not, perhaps it was by Ren’s design, that Hux did retire to his chambers that night.

Ren was standing in front of the window across from Hux’s bed. His back was turned; at his sides were those hands that were perpetually coiled in tight fists. His mask was off, abandoned on Hux’s table which Millicent had taken to exploring with much interest.

Ren was watching the stars float passed, or at least he looked as though he was. Hux always assumed Ren was too fixated on the dark and the abysmal things in life to appreciate true beauty when he saw it. Perhaps Ren stood before the stars, so magnificent they moved even a person like Hux, and saw none of it.

Hux stepped into his chambers, allowing the blast door to drop behind him. He didn’t know what Ren wanted, he was only certain that whatever it was, it wasn’t anything pleasant. Their animosity had escalated to a near toxic level beneath the stress of recent events. Not a day passed without at least one spat on the bridge between the two. Hux knew that the officers had begun to whisper of their fights—at least it was only whispering that the officers dared to do.

Tension rose instantly through his muscles, and even in his exhaustion Hux was poised for battle with the knight, if it came to that.

“General Hux,” Ren said as soon as the blast door was sealed. His voice was soft with a peculiar tremble that made Hux take pause.

“Lord Ren,” said Hux. “What a pleasant surprise; what brings you to my chambers this evening?”

“I’ve always liked your chambers,” said Ren and that tremble in his voice persisted. Something was wrong; Hux could feel it. “It’s always so clean…and orderly.”

Hux took several steps closer to the knight, but Ren did not turn.

“Ren…”

“We’ve never properly talk about what transpired between us, have we?”

“What transpired between us?” said Hux warily, stopping just behind Ren. “You mean that nasty business over the secret I betrayed? I think we’ve talked about it plenty.”

Ren shook his head, the pale lighting in the room spread through the black locks and Ren’s head seemed to shimmer.

“We’ve discussed it,” said Ren, “but never in the right way. What is it about the two of us, General, that keeps us from saying what we really want to say?”

Hux was at a loss for words, so taken aback by this sudden candor from Ren that he’d nearly forgotten how to speak.

“When you first promised me you’d keep my secret I didn’t understand why you would; I tried searching your mind for the answer but I couldn’t find it. You’re a complicated man, General and even with unobstructed access into your thoughts, I can’t make sense of you. You’re a blind spot for me. That scared me…it scares me still.” Ren finally turned. His face was pale, and glistening with a light sheen of sweat, there were dark circles beneath his eyes, while the eyes themselves shone with unreserved emotions that read of pain and dread.

Something was tormenting Ren, something had been for weeks and Hux, who never missed anything, had seen it. He’d known of the secret meetings between Snoke and Ren, he’d known of the long hours Ren spent locked away in his chambers afterwards and on the bridge it had escaped no one that Kylo Ren had been more irritable and quick tempered. Hux had recognized the anguish in the knight, and he had chosen to ignore it. After all whatever it was that had been eating away at the knight had absolutely nothing to do with Hux, so he left it alone.

But seeing Ren’s face staring at him, and taking in all the ways the inner turmoil had taken a toll on Ren’s physical body, had stirred up emotions from deep within Hux that he couldn’t easily identify—compassion and a deep desire to save Ren from whatever it was that pained him. But Hux didn’t know what to do; yet another unfamiliar feeling for him.

“What I did pick up from your thoughts though, was the last thing I expected,” Ren continued. “I saw that you wanted me. All I ever thought I could hope for was your friendship, and then I saw your desires for me and I thought…” Ren shook his head and runs his gloved hand through his hair. “It’s childish I know.”

“Yes,” said Hux, because he truly felt that it was, but then he saw the look on Ren’s face and he regretted saying it immediately. “But it’s not you who’s childish, it’s me.”

“You don’t have to say that,” said Ren. “I didn’t come here for affirmation; I just wanted to give you honesty for once.”

“Why? Why now?”

“Because everything is about to change very soon,” said Ren. “And I need you to know this…”

“Know what?” Hux was standing so close to him all he needed to do was reach out and touch Ren. He longed to do it. It was the first time in a long time the two of them had been standing together and speaking to one another with any sort of civility. Hux had told himself he’d grown numb to the animosity; what a lie that was. He’d missed Ren, missed that bond they shared before Hux’s betrayal tore down the foundations of trust that they’d only just begun to build. However brief the amenity between them had been, the connection had been intense and intimate. Hux couldn’t explain why, he only knows how it had felt during the time and it had felt as though something in the galaxy tied them together and together, connected, they stood more powerfully than ever, untouchable against the universe. Hux missed that.

“I need you to know why I so desperately wanted to believe that you can see me as more than just a thorn in your side.”

“I don’t see you as just that…”

The corners of Ren’s lips quirked; a flash of a smile that was gone in a blink. “More than just another comrade in war, then.” Ren reached out and he touched Hux, doing what Hux had been craving to do, but was too afraid to do. His hands were on Hux’s face, nails digging through the gloves into Hux’s skin, holding on so tightly like a man dangling from a cliff clingingly on for his life. “It’s because I need you. I don’t know why, but I need you. Since the moment I met you I’ve been drawn to you, you’re my darkness.”

The unconventional last statement startled Hux. “I’m your darkness?”

Ren shook his head and the soft, strands brushed across his face. “I don’t know how to explain it. But when I’m around you I don’t feel that pull from the light and it’s the only time I feel free. I need you, and I don’t want to need you. If only I was stronger I wouldn’t need you to fight away the light; that I could do it on my own, just as I’m meant to. I tried to tell myself that I didn’t need you.”

Hux didn’t understand it. The Force had always been a ridiculous thing to Hux, imprecise and unscientific and infinitely contradictory. Hux’s logical and practical mind could never understand a thing like that, but none of that mattered at that moment. The only thing he did understand was the only thing he needed to understand and it was that Ren needed him.

Ren brought his hand to Hux’s neck and gently slipped his fingers underneath the collar of his uniform. He was touching Hux’s throat, stroking the spot where Hux had felt the invisible hands of Ren’s Force Choke pressing down against. “I never should have…all those times I lashed out against you…”

“No, you shouldn’t have.”

Ren looked pained. “I’m sorry that I’ve hurt you,” he said. “And I’m sorry that I’m not better at this.” He began to pull his hand away, but Hux caught it, gripping on tightly to it. Ren’s eyes widened, looking uncertain, but he allows it. Hux pulls Ren into him, closing the small space that had been between them. He brings his other hand through Ren’s hair, feeling the hair trailing against the leather of his gloves. Though a little voice in his mind told him he was making a terrible mistake, Hux couldn’t stop himself.

Hux had always believed he was strong, impervious to the temptations of all the other simple-minded life forms that polluted the galaxy. But he learned quickly that when Kylo Ren was standing in front of him with those dark eyes begging for him, and those full lips so close to his mouth, General Hux the Great was as simple-minded a life form as all the rest.

For the first time in his life, Hux shut his mind down, suspended all of his thoughts, and allowed himself to be the fool. He slipped his hand around the back of Ren’s neck and pulls his face into Ren’s, pushing his lips onto the mouth he had been yearning to have another taste of since that night in the kitchen.

The last time he kissed Ren, Hux’s mind had been fuzzy with the alcohol in his blood stream, this time is mind was clear, and he felt it all, the tickle of Ren’s tongue trailing the inside of his cheeks, the smell of Ren’s hair each time it fell forward and brushed against the side of Hux’s face, and Ren, melting into him, moaning softly into his mouth.

“Stay here. Stay with me tonight,” Hux breathed into Ren.

Ren did.

It was nearly morning, in a few hours’ time Hux was to rise for his shift. They were lying side by side, squeezed against each other on a bed that was too small for the both of them. Beneath the tangled sheets, Ren’s bare body was moist against Hux’s. Ren had his head against Hux’s chest, breathing softly, brushing warm air onto Hux’s chest.

Hux had been drifting in an out of sleep when Ren spoke to him, “General, whatever it is you’re planning don’t do it.”

Hux opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. Had he let his guard down so completely that he allowed Ren to discover the secret buried deep in his mind? How much does Ren know? What Hux found most troublesome about the notion however, was not that his secret might have been discovered, but the realization that a part of him wanted Ren to know. He didn’t want to hide anything from the man lying in his arms.

“Ren, listen…”

“No,” said Ren, pushing himself off of Hux’s chest. He sat up and looked down those long thick lashes at Hux. “I need you, and you need me too. Tell me I’m wrong.”

He wasn’t wrong. Hux did need Ren. He needed that raw power coursing through Ren’s body, he needed Ren by his side when he claimed his destiny…he needed Ren, just Ren. And Ren needed him. That should have been everything to Hux.

“You and me together, we can have what we want, we can have each other…just let go of the rest of it. I know you want those other things, I know you think you need them, but please, let it go…”

Hux sighed and he raised his hand to Ren’s face and pushed away a loose lock of hair from his eyes. Hux didn’t think he’d ever tire of running his fingers through that hair.

“Say something,” said Ren, closing his eyes and leaning into Hux’s touch.

“What do you want me to say?” said Hux.

“I want you to tell me that I’m enough.”

Hux sat up in bed so he could be eye to eye with Ren, he leaned in and said quietly, “You are more than enough, Ren, always.”

A blinding orange light coming through the kitchen window knocks into the memory. The light is accompanied by the roaring sound of a dying engine and followed by a crash that shatters the ground and made the entire house tremble. From the children’s bedroom comes the sound of crying.

Hux jumps to his feet, completely alert. He walks out of the kitchen and sees Mary standing in the hall with her hand on the knob of the door to her children’s room.

She looks at Hux white faced and startled eyed. “What was that?”

“Stay with the children, I’ll go check,” says Hux.

“Be careful,” Mary says, but Hux barely hears her. He was already half way out the door.

The air outside is heavy with smoke, the smell of it and the fog of it. Hux feels the familiar pressure of a coughing fit coming and attempts to suppress it. He looks first to his hunting shed where his rifles are kept. There are exactly nine steps from the hunting shed to his front porch, that’s three sets of three counts. From the shed to the thing that has crash landed on his front lawn, Hux estimates, is another nine steps approximately.

He assesses his chances of holding an advantage over the intruder. The thing on his lawn is a large aircraft. Judging from the smoke and the emergency lights that are causing orange orbs to spin through the yellowed grass in front of his house, the crash landing has caused server damage to the vessel, whoever is inside would no doubt have sustained injuries. From his assessments, Hux determines that the advantage is in his favor. However, that doesn’t stop his other observation from filling him up with dread. The aircraft is a shuttle, but no ordinary one, it is an Upsilon-class command shuttle to be exact, Hux would recognize one of those anywhere.

Hux gives in to his coughing fit as he allows the reality to sink in—The Imperial First Order has found him.

***

Matt forces the door of the shuttle open and sticks his head out to find himself surrounded by a cloud of thick smoke. The shuttle had landed on its side with the door facing upwards, and at his full height, and standing on the artillery box that he’s using as a makeshift stepping stool to help hoist him up to the door, only Matt’s upper body is sticking out of the shuttle. He still has to climb out the rest of the way and jump down—preferably without breaking any bones—to reach the ground.

This is, arguably, one of the most stressful experiences Matt has ever encountered in his life. And the worst part of it is he isn’t even sure if he’s reached his intended destination.

Well, actually, that’s the second worst part, the first worst part, Matt discovers, is that there is someone standing behind him, with a weapon pointed at his head.

Matt feels the pressure of the weapon, pressed up against his skull and freezes.

“Don’t move,” comes the sound of a man’s voice and that voice is followed by the sound of short, raspy coughs.

Matt tries to steady the hammering in his chest as he said, “I’m unarmed. I don’t mean any harm, I’m just here to find somebody.” Almost immediately he regrets his first statement as it occurs to him that it was probably unwise to inform the man, who was in fact armed, that he himself is vulnerable with no weapon of his own.

But to Matt’s surprise, the moment he spoke, the pressure against his skull lifts. The strange, choked coughing, that had been a persistent background noise since Matt lifted his head out of the shuttle disappeared as well.

_Is he gone?_ Matt thinks. He hesitates for a moment, before he slowly turned around to look. No, the person who had been holding the weapon to his head isn’t gone, Matt finds. The person is standing stiffly, the weapon still held up in his hands though it is no longer directly pointed at Matt.

Matt adjusts his glasses in an attempt to clear out the fog from the smoke clinging to his lenses. It made little difference, so Matt leans slightly forward out of the door instead, for a better look at the person in front of him. He pauses.

“General Hux?” Matt isn’t sure if he believes his eyes. What are the odds he’d climb out of his shuttle to find the very man he had come searching for standing right in front of him?

But another look tells Matt that it is, undeniably, General Hux. The General looks unchanged, if only slightly less polished than before. His pale face, though still shaven, is less closely so, allowing specks of tiny red stubble to surround his mouth, and his hair is longer and flapping over his face in wispy ginger locks.

“General!” Matt exclaims, feeling a wash of relief, he hadn’t imagined the mission would so easy.

“Oh,” says Hux dryly in response, he’s narrowing his eyes. “It’s you; the clone.”

Matt doesn’t know if he imagined it but he thought he heard a trace of disappointment in the General’s voice.

“Did you expect it to be Kylo?”

Hux looks to the side and lets out that strange choked cough, before he turns back to Matt. “I rather hoped it wouldn’t be. Aren’t I lucky it’s you instead?”

Matt places his hands down on the side of the shuttle’s door, ready to hoist himself out, but before he could Hux says sharply, “Ah uh,” and the barrel of the gun in his hand is pointed back on Matt, at his chest this time.

Matt meets Hux’s eyes with hesitation. “I came alone,” he says, sensing Hux’s doubt. “No one knows I’m here.”

Hux doesn’t lower his gun but he does raise an eyebrow and flicks his eyes quickly to the damaged shuttle then back onto him. “You embarked on a secret mission with a showy, Upsilon-class command shuttle? Smart. No one in the galaxy would dare stop or follow an Imperial First Order shuttle, nor question its business. I would have thought of you as the type to assume that stealing away in the dead of the night in an unmarked craft was a better idea.”

There was an insult somewhere in what Hux just said, Matt is certain of it, but with the gun pointed at his chest, Matt decides it would be wiser not to acknowledge it. “The General was the one who arranged all this for me.”

“The General?” That arched eyebrow of Hux’s lifts higher still.

“General Phasma.”

“Ah,” says Hux, and nothing else. Still, he doesn’t lower his weapon.

“She’s the reason I’m here, she sent me,” Matt tells him, then he thought he should clarify, “She sent me to find you.”

“Oh did she? For a moment I thought she sent you on holiday and it’s by pure coincidence that you landed on my front lawn.” Then Hux adds, as a second thought, “However, I am wondering, why are you on my front lawn?”

Matt looks at Hux in confusion. “…cause I’m here to find you?”

“Yes, you mentioned that. But how did you know I’d be here?”

“Well I had the coordinates,” Matt explains, though he thought that ought to be rather obvious. He’d always been made to believe that General Hux was remarkably intelligent, now he’s wondering if perhaps the man had merely been overpraised.

“You had the coordinates to this planet, which is a rather large planet, despite appearances, and yet of all the places to land, it’s right here, on my very lawn, where your shuttle crashes.”

“Oh, you mean that,” says Matt, though he’s unable to explain the convenient coincidence himself.

“Why did your shuttle crash, by the way? I’m assuming General Phasma would have supplied you with enough fuel to last the trip and back.”

“She did,” said Matt sheepishly. “I just….I didn’t really know how to land it.”

Hux’s eyes brightened with a look of amused incredulity that spreads across his face. “You know how to fly it, but you can’t land it?”

“Well….no, I didn’t really know how to fly it either.”

The amusement on Hux’s face disappears leaving only the incredulity in its place. “And yet you made it halfway across the galaxy, completely unharmed. Which, speaking of that, you should have been severely injured in the crash but look at you, not even a cut.”

Matt can’t quite decipher the implication Hux is getting at, though he is positive Hux is most definitely implying something about him, and it makes Matt uncomfortable to be scrutinized in such a way. “I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

“Well it has been a year,” says Hux, considering. “Enough time for you to be properly trained in the Force. Have you been training?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Matt is growing quickly irritated by the direction the conversation is going in.

“It’s a working theory of mine, just indulge me won’t you?”

A theory? Matt feels a prickle of disquiet upon hearing that, what kind of theory could General Hux possibly have about him? He feels like a specimen being carefully studied and resents it. He glowers at Hux; refusing to answer.

“The answer is no, isn’t it? You’re not any more trained in the Force than you had been a year ago, are you?” says Hux. “Yet, strangely, it does look as though you are significantly more skilled.”

“I didn’t use the Force to get here,” Matt says quickly. Whatever Hux is getting at, he’s wrong.

“No, not on its own,” Hux muses. “I’m thinking it’s a combination.”

“A combination?” Matt feels lost.

“Of memory and the Force.”

Matt frowns, wondering if Hux might have gone crazy in the year that had passed. “Memory? Of what?

“You know, I have always thought that nothing about your entire existence makes any sense at all.”

Matt’s had enough of the nonsense and he feeling very defensive a last he snaps, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“No need to get offended,” Hux says. “It wasn’t an insult.”

“Well maybe you shouldn’t have made it sound like an insult then.”

“I didn’t make it sound like anything, don’t blame me for the way you chose to interpret my simple words.”

Matt has the sense that General Hux is enjoying himself and refusing to allow Hux to derive anymore pleasure from his scrutiny, Matt looks down to the weapon pointed at his chest. “Are you going to keep pointing that thing at me? Or are you going to let me climb out of this shuttle?”

“Those aren’t my only options,” says Hux in a measured tone. “I can always shoot you. You said no one knows you’re here, which means no one knows that I’m here, shooting you might be my only way of assuring that things stay this way.”

“W-well are you going to shoot me?” It occurred to Matt that he truly didn’t know whether or not Hux would shoot him; with the General it really could go either way.

Hux seems to consider his options for a moment, and then he lowers his weapon, and sets the hilt down on the ground. He coughs several times and then says to Matt, “There’s a button in the cockpit that’ll disable the emergency distress protocol and shut the ship down.”

“Oh,” says Matt. He was wondering if the emergency lights and the engine fumigation would shut down on its own. He ducks back into the shuttle and steps off the artillery box. He crawls through the interior wreckage from the crash, feeling the debris beneath his palms and knees as he went. He reaches the cockpit and begins searching for the button. “I’m in the cockpit, General,” he calls up to Hux. “What’s the button look like?”

“It’s blue, on the left hand side next to the co-pilot’s seat,” Hux calls back between coughs. Matt wonders if Hux was alright. He’d assumed, at first that the cough might have been due to the smoke, but the sound was deep, and each cough came with a worrisome hitch of breath and Hux sounded like he was choking each time.

Matt tells himself not to worry about Hux and to focus on the task at hand. He crawls over to the co-pilot’s seat and sure enough, just as Hux said, there on the left hand side is the blue button. Matt pushes it and almost instantly the orange lights that had been whirling in from the open latch door stops.

Matt returns to the door, steps back up on the box and hoists himself out of the shuttle. He braces himself against the smooth side of the shuttle and slides down to the ground, landing in a crouch, at eye level with the worn and torn wooden hilt of Hux’s weapon.

Matt stands up and wipes his hands on his grey standard issue, Imperial First jumpsuit to brush away the debris and dirt.

“Was that really necessary?” Matt asks pointing at the weapon.

“Yes,” says Hux simply, before adding, “Consider yourself fortunate; when I landed here I was greeted by a mob of villagers holding hunting rifles and kitchen knives and I didn’t make half the ruckus you did. Oh and I’m not a General anymore.”

That’s true, Matt thinks. He’d called Hux, ‘General’ before, out of habit, but Hux is no General now. The revelation sends a sudden flash of inspiration shooting into Matt’s mind and he says to Hux, “That’s right, you’re not a General anymore.” Then, without thinking twice, Matt curls his fingers into a fist swings his arms back and hurls his fist straight into Hux’s face.

Hux’s head snaps backwards, and he lets out a sharp, painful grunt. He recovers quickly though, turning his face back to Matt, an expression of shock and disbelief clear on his face. Hux’s bottom lip is bleeding, and he raises a finger to prod gingerly at the rip in his lip. His eyes flick down to the blood on his finger and then back at Matt.

“That is for the time you strapped me to the interrogation bench,” Matt says.

Surprisingly, Hux only shrugs and says, “So it is.”

Emboldened by Hux’s reaction, or rather, lack of one, Matt raises his fist once more to take another swing, “And this is for what you did to, Kylo.” Like last time, Matt hurls his fist towards the direction of Hux’s face, but unlike last time, Hux catches Matt in the act, pulls him forward and throws Matt to the ground.

Matt lands painfully on his back with the grass beneath him prickling him through the fabric of his clothes.

“What I did to Ren?” Hux says coldly, sound indignant. “Typical.” And then, without another word, Hux turns from Matt and begins to walk away.

Seeing Hux leave Matt scrambles to pick himself up from the ground, ignoring the pain jabbing through his injured muscles.

“Hey, Jerkface!” Matt calls to Hux when he was back on his feet. “You can’t just leave me here!”

Hux doesn’t turn around, but he does say over his shoulder. “Are you hungry? We have some left over bantha meat that Mary made a few nights ago.”

_Mary?_ Matt thinks. “Who’s Mary?”

What Hux says in response is the last thing Matt expected, “My wife.”

***

The clone is peering up at Hux over a plate of reheated bantha meat. He’s looking through those thick lenses with Ren’s eyes and Hux wonders if he’s dreaming. He’s had dreams like this before, dreams of him sitting in this house with Ren by his side. In those dreams Ren always took the place of Mary and the house, though it looked the same, was a picturesque cottage, instead a dingy, decrepit structure and the planet was a lush, green planet with blue lakes and fascinating wildlife. Him and Ren, they’d spend the day hunting and at night they’d be here, sitting across the kitchen table from one another. Sometimes, in those dreams, they spoke to each other when they supped together, they talked about the unresolved transgressions that sit between the two of them; other times they just sat in silence. But always, in his subconscious mind which Hux pushed aside in his waking hours, he found that certain peace within himself, as he savored the few short hours he spent in Ren’s company in his dreams.

So, this isn’t exactly like those dreams, just as this clone is not exactly Ren, but it’s the closest Hux has been to Ren in over a year and Hux’s mind is spinning, uncertain of what to make of all of this.

Hux feels a cough rising from the back of the throat and he picks up a napkin from the table and covers it over his mouth.

“Are you okay?” the clone asks. He sounds so genuinely concerned Hux is ticked with the urge to mock him.

The clone’s compassion is nothing like Ren, Hux observes. Hux had never known Ren to worry for anyone other than himself.

“I’m fine,” says Hux, recovering from the cough. He pulls away the napkin and glances down at the bubbles of spit and dry, crusted blood from the cut the clone had left on his lip.

The clone doesn’t press the matter, moving instead to ask an even more invasive question, “Why were you counting?”

“What?”

“Before. You were counting.”

“When?”

“Out there, when we were walking back to the house.”

_Shit_ , Hux thinks, _had I been doing that out loud_? “I wasn’t counting.”

What the clone doesn’t know is that Hux had been counting since the moment the clone turned to face him out there on his front lawn. He’d been counting down the minutes, keeping time. The clone had said he’d come alone, and Hux doesn’t doubt that the clone believed that, but Hux also doesn’t doubt that the Imperial First Order were right behind him.

Phasma might have checked the shuttle and disabled any sort of tracking device before sending the clone off to find him, but what she would most certainly have overlooked was Ren and the connection he shares with his clone.

If the clone is here, tracker or not, Ren would be able to sense him, and just like that a year of hiding away would end with the Imperial First Order being led straight to his door, by this ridiculous parody of Kylo Ren.

So Hux counts down. By his estimation, Ren and the Imperial First Order would be at most three hours behind. But Hux won’t allow himself so wide a margin of error. He has an hour and a half, at most, and the first hour is almost up.

The clone fixes him with a quizzical look, then shrugs and mumbles something into his food that sounded rather like, _“Whatever.”_

For a time they sit in silence and the only sounds that broke through the quiet was the soft chewing from the clone and Hux’s pesky cough. The cough, to Hux’s irritation, never fails to draw that look of concern from the clone, but at least he said nothing of it. The clone is quickly devouring the plate of meat in large chunks. He’s hungry, Hux could tell, which is odd, Hux would have thought Phasma would provide him with enough provisions to last a round way trip.

“Food has been scarce outside the palace. Even the military is supplied limited rations of food a day, the General couldn’t pack too much food in the shuttle for me without raising suspicion,” the clone explains.

To hear he had more food here on this sad, barren planet than those trapped in the world he left behind rang in Hux’s ears as some sort of poetic justice. The suffering of billions is the consequence for robbing Hux of his destiny and handing all that belongs to him to Snoke and it was the universe’s doing. The universe and Ren’s.

“Ah,” said Hux shortly. It’d been some time since he’d had his thoughts invaded in that way, and he certainly hasn’t missed it.

“I don’t actually get it,” says the clone. “How the Empire can be so poor that it can’t even feed its own people.”

“It’s because the Empire is in debt,” Hux replies. “It’s simple economics. In the years we’ve been at war, the New Republic had been taking loans out to fund the war effort. When we destroyed the Hosnian System, we destroyed an entire system of planets that generated revenue. That revenue contributed greatly to paying back the loans, without it the New Republic struggled to pay back their debts, thereby weakening them, which is what allowed Snoke to take power. But, consequently, by acquiring what was once the New Republic into the New Galactic Empire, the Empire also acquired the debt.”

“But Snoke used your plan to take power,” says the clone.

“Yes, he did,” says Hux shortly.

“You knowingly formed a plan to build an Empire in debt?” the clone looks dubious.

“Of course not,” said Hux. “I had a plan in place to pay back the debt, Snoke has it too, considering all of my plans are now his, but the only difference is, Snoke is most likely refusing to pay it back.”

“I don’t see why he should,” says the clone. “It’s not his debt and he’s the Emperor, he doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do.”

“Hmm…” says Hux. “If only things were so easy. Emperor or not, debts are not easily forgotten and the one who’s owed is always going to want to be repaid. If Snoke wants to avoid adding another enemy to his list and it would be wise if he does, he’ll have to pay those debts back, and he knows this. Which is why, I’m sure, he’s optioned to keep the Empire in its pitiable state, if the Empire isn’t generating revenue, the Empire can’t pay, which is far more forgivable than simply refusing to pay—for a time, it won’t work for long.”

“That can’t be right,” says the clone. “The palace is lavish and Snoke lives in luxury.”

“Then he must be raising taxes to fund his high cost of living, leaving the people to suffer for his debt while he lives in luxury. It’s not hard to imagine, it’s expected even,” says Hux with a shrug.

“And the reason all this has happened is because of you,” says the clone with a harsh, accusing look at Hux. “Why did you do it?” he asks, swallowing his last bite of food.

Hux sits back and scowls at the question. He has twenty more minutes to indulge the clone; he might as well use the next twenty minutes to set the record straight. “Ren did this, not me.”

Hux expected the clone to challenge that statement on behalf of his beloved ‘Kylo,’ but, surprisingly, the clone just lowers his head and says quietly, “I knew you’d say that.”

Hux was annoyed. He wanted the clone to challenge him, he wanted to hear a defense for Ren, and he wanted to shoot down that defense and put into words just how much of a double-crossing, self-righteous piece of shit he thinks Ren is.

All of this brings back a memory of the two of them on Starkiller Base before the fateful day struck. Hux had just finished his speech and finished watching his beautiful weapon discharge into the sky. He’d stood there on his platform drinking in the power he felt surging through him as a billion lives were extinguished at his whim. But no sooner had his weapon given him power than Ren had stripped it away.

The knight was there waiting for him when Hux stepped back into the base. Hux can still remember the brush of warm air on his cold skin chewed raw by the icy wind out there on that platform.

Hux hadn’t expected to see Ren though. Ren was supposed to be on his way to Takodana, but there he was. His posture was stressed, fists clenched tighter than Hux could ever remember seeing them, and his chest rose and fell heavily, as though he were struggling to breath.

“Leave us,” Ren hissed to the officers at Hux’s side. The officers looked to Hux as a courtesy, and Hux dismissed them with a nod.

The officers left quickly, and as soon as they were alone, Ren spoke to him. He didn’t step close to Hux, keeping a wide distance between them.

Only two nights before the two of them had been lying together in Hux’s small bed and yet that day they were like strangers talking from a distance.

“You’re still going through with your plans aren’t you?” said Ren.

Hux couldn’t meet Ren’s eyes even though he knew all he’d see were the slits on that mask. “Ren, I have to, it’s my destiny. I can’t let that go.”

Ren draws in a sharp breath. “Then you’ve made your choice,” he said.

“Ren, wait,” said Hux, he stepped towards Ren, reaching a hand out to touch him, but Ren pulls away, and without another word, he moved around Hux and was gone.

Another coughing fit pulls Hux out of his memory. The clone had finished with his food, and was now staring at him over the plate of bones that had been cleaned of the very last speck of meat.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” Hux hisses. He has fifteen more minutes to indulge the clone; he’s willing to answer any question the clone asks him so long as he stops with that irksome show of concern over Hux’s cough.

“How can you have a wife?” the clone decides to ask, of all questions and Hux amends his previous thought—he’s willing to answer any question the clone asks him, but not that.

The clone must have heard Hux’s thoughts for Hux’s sees a blatant look of annoyance flash across his face, that’s quickly followed by another question, “How did General Phasma know the coordinates to find you?”

“She didn’t tell you?” says Hux.

“She said your father gave it to her.”

His father. Hux sits up. He’d wanted to ask about his father since the moment the clone set foot inside his house, but something had been stopping him, a gut feeling he’s been trying to ignore. “Then I suppose my father gave it to her.”

“How did he know?” asks the clone.

“I told him,” said Hux.

The clone’s eyes widens in surprise. “You’ve been in contact with him?”

“No…I told him years ago. The night I received my assignment to take command of the _Finalizer_. I had determined long ago that there were only three possible scenarios that my plans would fail: this was one of the scenarios I had mapped out—minus a few details of course—and in this particular scenario, where Snoke discovers my plot and utilizes my plans to seize power for himself, I determined that this was the safest place for me to go, which I shared with my father that night I received my assignment.”

“Why here?” asks the clone, dubiously.

“It’s at least three systems away from the Imperial Capital and even in this system it’s too far in the outer rim with no political nor economic advantages. They have nothing to offer the Imperial First Order; not even able-bodied citizens that can be drafted as soldiers. It’s just a place with half-starved people where nothing grows, so the chances of anyone from the Imperial First Order setting foot on this planet was very, very small.”

“You didn’t think that the Emperor would send soldiers out here to find you?”

_The Emperor_ , the clone says, speaking of Snoke. It eats at Hux, and he feels his stomach twisting in disgust and bitterness. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because this is the last place I’d go. Anyone who examined my files and analyzed my behavioral pattern, personality trait and psychology would draw the conclusion that I’m narcissistic with delusions of grandeur, which would mean that I would be unlikely to subject myself to living on a planet such as this one. This would be the first place they crossed off the list in their search for me.”

“Wow…” the clone says. “You really accounted for every last thing.”

“Yes, it’s a talent.” For all the good it’s done him. Ten more minutes. Hux has to ask, he has to know. “My father,” he says slowly, “is he still alive?”

Hux only needed to see the way the clone’s face falls to know the answer and he feels something inside of him break. He barely hears the clone through the ringing inside his ears. “He was executed seven months ago by one of the Knights of Ren.”

Hux feels himself rise from his seat, but his mind does not connect itself to the action. In the background Hux hears the clone say, “It wasn’t Kylo…he wasn’t there on the day of the execution,” as though that makes any difference at all.

It doesn’t make a difference. Not one bit.

Hux walks to the sink and grips the edge of the ceramic basin so tightly his knuckles turn cold and white, an urge to hurl overtakes him but he holds it in, replacing it with a bout of violent coughing. He feels his lungs closing in, and tries to calm himself.

_Not now. Later. You have eight minutes. Focus,_ he thinks to himself _. Later_ , he thinks again. He’ll deal with the confirmation of his father’s death later, let it take the form of grief, probably, and blind fury, most likely. Right now, he needs to focus. He needs to keep his mind calm, and trained on one goal—survival.

“I’m sorry,” the clone’s voice is soft and vexingly sympathetic.

“For what.”

“For…your loss?” Now the clone sounds unsure of himself. “That’s what people say, for these things, isn’t it?”

Hux’s back is still turned to the clone. “Yes, it is,” he says. “Though I never really understood why. Sympathy is a terrible waste of energy, one that achieves absolutely nothing. I’ve never known sympathy to bring back the dead.”

“I’m sorry I can’t make you feel better,” says the clone quietly and sincerely, and Hux so wants to punch him.

He turns and finds sad eyes looking back at him through those thick, hideous lenses.

“Why are you here?” says Hux, he had been clinging to the hope that Phasma had sent the clone to him on his father’s behest, now that the hope is gone Hux can find no reason for the clone to have come in search of him.

“The General sent me to bring you back.”

Hux scoffs. “She should have sent an army then, for if she thinks I’d go back willingly then she has sorely miscalculated.”

“Well she thought I might be able to talk you into it.”

“Did she?” Hux asks sardonically. “And how exactly did she think you’d do that?”

“I don’t know…but if you come back with me—”

“—I’d be a prisoner. You think I’d willingly give up my freedom and follow you back to Snoke so he can lock me up in a cell and torture me at his whim for retribution?”

“You won’t be a prisoner,” the clone says automatically.

“Won’t I be?”

The clone seems to reconsider his previous pronouncement, “Well, I don’t actually know…I didn’t consider that part…”

“No of course you didn’t.”

“But you have to come back,” says the clone, getting to his feet.

“Why?”

“Because people are suffering.”

“People suffer all the time,” says Hux, uncertain of why anyone would think such a trivial thing should be any of his concern.

“You’re the only one who can save them.”

That makes Hux laugh out loud. He was born to be many things, but a savior? Never. “The galaxy is full of heroes, I’m not one of them.”

“No you aren’t,” the clone snaps in frustration. “You’re one of the biggest shits I’ve ever met, which, I guess I haven’t met too many people, but if I had, I’m sure you’d still be one of the biggest shits. You are selfish and cruel and terrible…but you’re good at what you do.”

“Good at what I do?” says Hux smoothly. “You mean at being selfish and cruel and terrible?”

“No, I mean at leading,” says the clone. “We don’t need a hero right now, we need a leader.”

“You have a leader, it’s a shame he isn’t a very good one, but history is plagued with terrible rulers. Accept it.” His time is up. Hux pushes himself away from the sink and moves towards the door, but then the clone says something that makes Hux stop dead in his tracks.

“Kylo needs you.”

“What?”

“Kylo,” says the clone, and that voice is filled with melancholy and despair. “He’s….something’s happened to him…after Starkiller Base…he just…he needs you.”

“All the more reason I’m staying right here,” says Hux.

That isn’t what the clone expected to hear, he makes that clear with that look of outrage on his face. “But he’s suffering! He needs help, he’s lost and sometimes he’s scared too and I don’t know how to help him. Some nights when he’s asleep I hear his thoughts, he calls out for you; he needs you!”

“Well then I must go to him at once,” says Hux.

The clone is not amused. “I feel like you’re being sarcastic.”

“That’s because I am.”

“I know you love him,” the clone exclaims, and he sounds like he’s accusing Hux of something. “You’ve always loved him and I’ve always sensed it, even before I knew what I was sensing.”

Hux can’t help from feeling violated at having his most intimate feelings laid out before him. He grinds down on his back teeth and says tightly, “Loved… maybe… if I even know what love is.”

“You’re lying,” says the clone. “I know you still love him.”

Hux sighs. He’s out of time, he needs to put an end to this conversation. “Listen, from a purely pragmatic standpoint, the course of action you are asking me to take is one that would result in very little gain for me. In fact the possible scenarios in which I would find myself with an unpleasant fate far outnumbers the possible scenarios in which I would find myself faced with a pleasant one. There’s just not enough for me to risk everything to go back with you.”

“But Kylo—”

“—Yes, Kylo. You’re asking me to risk everything over one man and you’re assuming I’d do it simply based on the value you have placed on the notion of love. In truth, though, there is little value to love, it’s an insignificant and destructive sentiment; I learned that first hand and I never make the same mistake twice.”

The clone’s face is crestfallen. Hux had always thought that Ren was terrible at keeping his emotions concealed when not hiding behind his mask, but the clone is completely hopeless. Every last emotion that passed through the fibers of the clone’s being was worn on his face in those big, sad, puppy-dog eyes. Hux actually feels sorry for him.

“I know that isn’t what you want to hear,” says Hux. “And I’d say I’m sorry, but that would be disingenuous. Stay the night. I’ll fix your shuttle in the morning.”

Hux turns to leave the kitchen.

“Where’re you going?” calls the clone after him.

“To check on my wife,” Hux tells him casually. “Your elegant little landing on our front lawn gave her quite a fright. I need to check on her and the children.”

“You have children?” the clone asks in shock.

Hux doesn’t respond. He walks out of the kitchen and steps into the hallway, to look for Mary, but he doesn’t have to go far. She’s standing there already in the shadows of the dark hallway, waiting for him.

_How much has she heard?_ Hux wonders. _All of it, probably._

It’s confirmed when he draws close to her and she speaks. “You’re wrong, Ben.”

“I’m wrong?”

“The decision you’re making right now, to walk away from the one you love,” says Mary in earnest.

Hux has to chuckle at that. “Mary Blackwood,” he says tenderly. “Always the romantic.”

“Yes,” she says, there’s a hint of pride in her voice. “I am. Always.” And Hux sees how young she truly is, just a girl behind the world-weary face. “I would do anything if I could get the love of my life back, I know I never can. But you can. If the one you love isn’t worth you risking everything for, what in this galaxy is? Go back to him; you’ll never truly live if you don’t.”

“Mary, it’s complicated,” Hux says, and he feels at once restless and exhausted.

“What love isn’t?” says Mary. “I know I’m no one to you, and you have no reason to listen to me, but if you’re as smart as I know you are then you already know I’m right.”

Hux smiles at her. He raises a hand and runs it through her soft hair, and for the first time he does that and does not think of Ren. It’s the first genuine display of affection he had ever shown her. “You’re not no-one to me, you’re my wife.” He pulls her into him, leans down and says into her ear. “Do you remember the shuttle I flew in on? It’s in an abandoned hunting lodge in the woods four miles north of here. It’s fueled and provisioned.” Hux had been maintaining that shuttle, keeping it well fueled and stocked with food and supplies and prepared for this very day since the moment he arrived on this planet. “Take the children, go to it, and wait for me there. If I don’t come within the hour, leave this planet.” Hux wills Mary to listen to him. He knows the protocol of the Imperial First Order; it’s the same as it would have been back in the days when they were simply the First Order. The army’s invasion of this planet would end in complete and total annihilation of the planet, whether or not they leave with Hux in their custody.

He hears a soft purring at his feet, and feels Millicent rubbing up against him, coiling her tail around his leg. He bends, scoops her up and passes her along to Mary. “Take her,” he says. “Go.”

Mary, with the cat in her arms, disappears into her children’s room, and Hux heads out the door of the house towards the crashed shuttle on his front lawn.

_One, two, three,_ _breathe_. _One, two, three_ , _breathe_ —No, the count is all wrong, it’s too fast. He’s messed up his pace. He stops, looks back towards the house, he needs to go back, start again.

_Stop, focus,_ he thinks. _You don’t have time to waste._

Hux fights against his need to go back to the house and restart the count. He keeps moving, faster towards the shuttle. He realizes he’s coughing violently, he probably has been for some time now without even noticing it.

His lungs are tight and he’s trying to draw in air, but it’s difficult to breathe.

_Your father’s dead._ Come’s a voice in his head. Whose voice is that? Is it his? Ren’s? _You’ll never see him again._ It’s no one’s, it’s just a voice.

_Focus_. That’s his voice now, but it’s choked and breathless. By the time he reaches the shuttle he feels dizzy, and he’s trying to draw in air through short, tight, ragged breaths.

He closes his eyes and tries to picture himself taking his medication, but all he can see is his father’s face. It’s a memory from years ago. The two of them are sitting together on a quiet night much like this and in the memory his father is smoking a pipe, blowing smoke rings into the air.

“You’re a smart lad, Bren. Truly, you are,” his father said to him, “but you believe in yourself too much.”

“What’s the problem with that?” Hux replied. He was seventeen years old and the cockiest little shit there ever was.

“The problem is that when you start to see yourself as invincible, you stop seeing all the ways that you’re not,” his father tells him. “Just like we must know the weakness of our enemies, we must also know our own weaknesses.”

_But I have no weakness,_ young Hux had thought, but did not say out loud. At the time, before he’d met Ren, he truly believed it.

Hux should have listened to his father, maybe then he’d still be alive. But he didn’t listen, he was too arrogant, too in love with himself to see his own weakness, and now his father is dead.

Hux is assaulted by another memory, one of him and Ren together in the snow on Starkiller Base. The planet is moments away from imploding, and Ren is there, translucent in the glow of the dying planet, bleeding out from various wounds that had been sliced into his body.

He’s on top of Hux, dangling him over a cliff, looking half-mad and half-dead. Every so often Ren’s eyes would flutter and glaze over as he fought the unconsciousness that threatened to take him over from too much blood loss.

“You brought this upon yourself,” Ren snarled into Hux’s face.

“Ren, you’re dying,” Hux said, feeling the sticky hot blood from a giant hole in Ren’s abdomen soaking into the fabric of his uniform. “You need medical attention.”

“Don’t!” Ren hissed, pushing down harder on Hux. Hux can still remember the cold snow on his back, seeping through his clothes, biting into his skin; turning it raw and numb. He can still remember the sensation of his head dangling over the edge of that cliff, and feel the strain on his neck as he kept his head up to look into Ren’s eyes.

Ren’s lightsaber was held against his throat. The thing had sustained severe damages, much like Ren himself. It crackled more shakily than usual; sending loose sparks flying in all directions and the end of the red-lighted band was jagged as though it had been cut in half.

Hux had it all planned out perfectly from the annihilation of the Hosnian System. It was a move that would display the power of the First Order and the threat they possessed against all those who stood against them. Planting fear throughout the galaxy; that was the first step. The next step was to weaken Snoke in the eyes of the galaxy through the destruction of the Starkiller Base. FN-2187’s defection from the First Order was no oversight, it was by design. Hux had been monitoring candidates for that very purpose since adopting his Stormtrooper’s program from his father, and he chose FN-2187, because the boy was a wallflower, there was nothing particularly impressive about him nor was there anything particularly inept about him, and for that he was unnoticeable, which made his non-conformity easy to hide until the time was right. And also, it was because his psychological evaluations and behavioral patterns revealed him to be compassionate and soft hearted; easily influenced by the ideals of morality. Subtly, Hux had him removed from standard Stormtrooper conditioning, and subliminally introduced him to ideologies that his comrades were barred from—ideologies that valued life and benevolence and freethinking. Even now, Hux laughs at the thought that FN-2187 must believe that he had broken away from the First Order of his own free will; he must feel so proud of his own accomplishment, wearing it on his chest like a badge of honor, like he was something special, heroic even. If only FN-2187 knew that everything he is, he is because Hux had designed him that way. Hux knowingly created a traitor in his ranks, with the intention of having that traitor lead his new found friends into the First Order’s base to destroy them from the inside. The destruction of the Starkiller Base and the small victory of the resistance should have weakened and humiliated Snoke in the eyes of the galaxy. The next and final step after that was simply political warfare, the seeds had already been planted, Hux merely needed to make the galaxy see Snoke for what he was. Not only a monster, but a monster who was unfit to rule, and in the galaxy’s desperate search for a ruler who was mighty, and bold and effective, they would have turned to Hux.

The plan was brilliant. And everything had been falling into place up until that moment Snoke informed Hux that Ren was still out there alone on the dying planet.

Hux should have turned away then, ignored Snoke’s order and left Ren to die in the snow, but he couldn’t, because he was weak.

When Hux left the base in search of Ren, he didn’t know what he would find out there in the snow, but the last thing he expected was to find Ren, tattered and bloodied, but standing, shakily, on his feet, flanked by the Knights of Ren.

Hux realized then, with a weight in his stomach like his insides had turned to lead, that he had walked straight into an ambush.

“I told you,” Ren said through his teeth, as he held Hux over the edge of that cliff. His face was pained, and every muscle in it was tense, and pulling into that horrible gash that had been sliced straight across his face causing blood to squeeze out. “I begged you to let it all go, and still you chose this over me!”

It was one of the Knights who had dragged Hux over to that cliff earlier. The knight who had dragged him had been poised and ready to throw him over the edge, but Ren had screamed, “No!” and all the knights looked to where he stood, bleeding into the snow. “He’s mine. Leave him to me.”

Through their masks, Hux had read the doubt in their body language.

“Leave me to him!” Ren ordered.

“But Lord Ren, you’re—”

“—Leave!” Ren shouted, looking like he was dangling on the brink of insanity.

So the knights left and Hux was alone with Ren and that lightsaber at his throat. It was clear what Snoke’s orders to Ren was—Kill General Hux. Snoke had sent Hux out into the snow to meet his death at the hands of Kylo Ren. How poetic and beautifully planned, Hux had to admire Snoke for it.

“Don’t make me do this!” Ren said, and there was agony in his eyes beneath the red glow of the lightsaber’s reflection.

“I’m not,” Hux had said, against the sting of the saber cutting into the thin layer of his skin. “Snoke is.”

“Why?” Ren said through a strain in his voice. “Why did you choose this?”

“You know why,” said Hux. “Why does anyone in this galaxy do anything? It’s all for power.”

“You don’t need the power,” said Ren. How astonishing it was that the man holding Hux’s life in his hands could sound so much like a petulant child.

“Everyone needs power, Ren, it’s why everyone wants it. You ought to understand that better than anyone.”

“You had power,” said Ren, the muscles in his jaws tightened and protruded beneath his cheekbones.

“No, I had ship, and an army of soldiers who only saw me as a gatekeeper to a higher power.”

“You could have had me,” said Ren, anger flashing behind his eyes.

Those words pierced Hux straight in the chest more painfully than the sting of the saber biting against his skin. Hux thinks back to the moment he was standing on that platform on the day he launched his weapon, watching the last of the obliteration painting the sky red. For a moment amidst the elation and the sensation of immortality from watching the destruction his weapon wrought, there had been a sadness that passed through Hux. Hux had tried to ignore it, but the sadness was there and it stayed with Hux and it wasn’t until he was hanging off the edge of that cliff that he knew why. It was because deep inside of him Hux always knew it would come to this, choosing his destiny meant he could never have Ren. Ren would always just be the thing that brushed against the tip of his finger, a tease, a dream that he can never truly have.

“You!” Hux barked out a sharp laugh, and the blade at his throat cut deeper into his skin. The smell of seared flesh tickled his nose. “I would have only ever had half of you, the other half I’d have shared with the charlatan who has that collar around your neck. Look at us now and tell me I could have had you…no, Ren, I could never have you. So go on and do it. Kill me; make your master proud, he might just love you for it…if he’s even capable of love.”

“You think I won’t?” Ren’s voice was hard and choked. “You think I won’t kill you?”

“No, I’m quite certain you will,” said Hux, “which is why I’m sorry….” Hux didn’t give Ren the time to brace himself or to snake into Hux’s mind and read Hux’s intention in order to foil the attack. Hux coiled his fingers around the hilt of Ren’s saber, and with all the might he could conjure from his body, he pushed himself up, pressing into Ren’s hold on the saber. It was easy, Ren was weak from his injuries and only half conscious, it was barely a fight. Another shove, a turn of Ren’s wrists, the saber slipped from Ren’s loosened grip and Hux - with his hold on the hilt - turned the weapon on its own master by thrusting the red band into Ren’s side where already he was bleeding from that massive hole in his gut. Ren lets out a scream that tears into Hux as well and he falls back into the snow. Blood pooled from Ren’s side, soaking into the white icy blanket beneath him.

Hux wanted to go to Ren but he didn’t. He takes one last look of Ren, and their eyes meet. There was nothing in Ren’s but cold hatred. Hux turns away from Ren and in the cruel, ironic ways of the universe, it’s then as Hux is walking away from Ren forever, that he realized that he loved Ren, that he always had since the moment he first laid eyes on him. Hux had always been right about love; it was distracting and destructive and utterly useless.

Hux was deep inside the woods, trying to maintain balance against the trembling of the planet’s imminent eruption. He saw a light up ahead but before he could make the decision to go and explore, someone grabbed him from behind. Hux wheels around braced for a fight when he saw that it was Phasma, still a captain, not yet a General. She did not have her helmet. Her chrome armor was scratched and dented and clinging to it were splotches of putrid slime. Hux didn’t have the time to request an explanation.

“There’s a shuttle for you,” Phasma told him, pointing to the light up ahead. “Go, General, take it and leave.”

Hux hesitates. _Leave_ , she said. _Run_ , she meant. Was he so craven that he would run from his destiny? From the very thing he had devoted his life to, chased away by the man he loved? No. General Hux doesn’t run.

Phasma grabs him, affixing her hands on both his arms. “General, you have to go,” she says firmly to him. “Leave! Now!”

Hux is shaken out of his memory by flashes of light appearing in the sky. The lights are drawing closer by the minute. The Imperial First Order is here. Hux is out of time.

At least the coughing has stopped, and he can breathe again, the memories of the past had distracted him long enough to calm him down. Feeling focused now, Hux climbs swiftly into the downed shuttle; he scurries through the dark vessel, crawling over the mess of the destruction from the crash in search of what he needs—the artillery box and the back-up fuel supply.

Hux finds the artillery box right beside the door, recognizing the shape instantly. He picks it up and hurls it out the opening he had climbed in from, just when the light from the oncoming fleet pours over him. The soft humming of the engines fills the night. The army is just moments from landing and Hux doesn’t have the time to search for the fuel supply, he’ll have to make do without it.

Hux hoists himself out the door and leaps to the ground beside the spot where the artillery box lands. The ships are so close now Hux can make out every detail on the sleek, silver bodies of those vessels as the wind from their engines blows through the crisp grass of his lawn.

He picks up the artillery box and runs towards the back of the house when he hears Mary calling him.

“Ben!” she screams and Hux knows she’s still inside the house.

Hux curses under his breath, and with the box under his arms, he goes to the front door, throws it open and finds Mary standing in the living room, pulling her two children behind her.

“Why are you still here?” he demands.

“He doesn’t want to leave,” says Mary looking at her eldest son, she’s half dragging him across the floor, as he cries and attempts to wrestle out of her grip.

Hux goes over to John and grabs him. “Stop this,” Hux hisses in the child’s face. “You see those men that are coming? They’ll kill everyone on this planet, including you and your mother and your brother if you don’t stop crying and leave right now.”

“Stop, you’re scaring him,” says Mary.

“He needs to be scared,” Hux snaps.

“They’re here,” comes a quiet voice from beside the kitchen, it’s the clone. Hux looks up and sees him looking at Mary and her children and he can see that bleeding heart of his begin to ooze.

Outside, Hux hears the voices as the army descends. Through the curtains of the windows he can see the silhouettes of figures moving as they surround the house.

“Do you have a backdoor?” asks the clone.

“We can get out from the window in our bedroom,” Mary replies, she’s speaking to Hux though.

“Go,” the clone says. “I’ll distract them.”

Hux meets the clone’s eyes, he knows he should thank him, but all he can manage is a small nod. This clone looks so much like Ren, but he is so unlike Ren, how can that be? …Hux has a theory…. but now is not the time to dwell on such things.

He adjusts his hold on the artillery box under his arm and takes a hold of John’s hand. He nods to Mary who has her youngest in one arm and his cat in the other and together they move to the bedroom.

Hux leads Mary and the children through the small room to the window by the door. He holds the box up and with the flat edge of the box’s side he knocks out the window frame. A cool draft pours in and the sound of the commotion caused by the invading army rises.

“You go out first,” he says to Mary. “I’ll lower the children to you when you’re on the ground.”

He helps Mary out, all the while listening to the sound of the chaos outside. He can’t discern what was happening, but by the sound of it, troopers aren’t coming near the house yet. Perhaps the clone _is_ buying them time.

When Mary is on the ground, Hux picks up little Robbie and hands him over to his mother. Then he turns to John who’s looking at him through puffy, red, angry eyes. The child is going to grow to hate him, Hux is certain of that; if they are lucky enough to survive the night, that is.

Hux takes the boy and lifts him out the window while Mary reaches up to pull him out from the other end. When the three were safely on the ground he looks to Millicent at his feet.

“Let’s go, little girl,” he says to her. She leaps gracefully out the window and Hux hands Mary the artillery box before jumping out himself.

“Come on,” he says to them. “Stay to the shadows and keep quiet.”

In the background Hux hears the sound of people screaming as they are pulled from their homes.

Hux sets the artillery box on the ground, kneels down, opens the box and pulls out a blaster. It’s been a long time since he’s held a weapon of this caliber in his hand, and he wished he had the time to relish the familiar feeling of having power in his hands, of feeling like a proper warrior…how’s he’s missed it. With the weapon in hand he closes the artillery box and hands it to Mary before he nods at her to go first.

Together they begin to move towards the woods, going around the side of the house, walking as quietly as they could. The troopers are in the house now, Hux can hear them knocking things down in search of him.

Little Robbie lets out a sob, and Hux shushes him, pushing Mary onwards. From his peripheral vision he can see several troopers in the distance with the beams of light from the shuttles illuminating them. They are busy rounding up villagers.

There are exactly a hundred steps before they reach the woods and two thousand and sixty steps before they reach Hux’s hidden shuttle.

Hux directs Mary to move faster, when suddenly something makes him freeze in his track. It is the flash of red in the corner of his eyes, and the sound of that wild buzzing of a lightsaber being ignited. Despite his better judgment, Hux turns his head to look, and there, in the distance, he sees Kylo Ren.

Ren’s tall figure looms over the villagers that had been gathered and forced to their knees before him. He’s moving through them, scanning their thoughts, no doubt, in search of any knowledge of Hux’s whereabouts.

He looks unchanged in that mask and the billowing black robes, and that old scarf wrapped around his neck.

Hux should keep moving, he must keep moving, he knows this, but he can’t move, he’s transfixed by the sight of Ren. It’s been a year, a full year, long nights and days since the last time he saw Ren. He sees the last image he has of Ren in his mind, soaking in a pool of his own blood in the snow.

He’s dreamt of Ren so often in the past year, but it’s never like this. This is no dream. This is real, Ren is real and tangible; the only distance separating them is a few steps.

But something is different, something is wrong. Hux can’t immediately put his finger on it but when he does it hits him like a blow to the gut. It’s in the way Ren moved, automatic and robotic. His body is poised, his back is straight, but devoid of that tension Ren always used to carry in his shoulders and while one hand floated from head to head, the other hand was lax, his fist uncurled. The Ren Hux remembers was always charged and heated and at the verge of blowing over, even behind the mask, Hux had always been able to feel that reckless passion steaming from him, but this Ren is cold and empty, stripped clean of all the life that made Ren, Ren.

Hux feels a trembling fury rising in him, a fury and hatred directed at Snoke.

_Well look at you now,_ Hux thinks in contempt. _Look at what he’s made you into. No one’s weapon, huh?_

Ren moves slowly, diligently, from villager to villager, unaware that the man he’s searching for is looking right at him.

_Look at me,_ Hux thinks at him. _Look at me!_ _Lift your eyes and look at me, damn it! You lifeless, piece of shit! LOOK AT ME!_

Ren doesn’t look at him, he doesn’t even hear him, because what Hux is seeing is just a shell, dressed up like Ren, there’s nothing inside. Ren can’t hear Hux, because Ren is gone and the weapon Hux is looking at has been given a single specific order: question the villagers, find the traitor, and nothing more.

Hux should leave. He knows this. But he doesn’t move.

He looks over at Mary, and he can tell from the way she looked back at him that she knows. She understands.

“Ben…” she says.

“Brendol,” says Hux. “My name is Brendol.” A name he shared with his father. Now the name is his and his alone.

Mary smiles. “Brendol…”

“Keep going, follow this path, it’ll take you to the shuttle. I’ve left instructions on how to fly it in the cockpit; don’t be afraid, it’s much easier than you’d think. Leave this planet, Mary, make sure you get off this planet before they do, and don’t look back.”

Mary nods. “Be safe, Brendol, and live well.”

“Goodbye, Mary.”

Hux waits until the sounds of the footsteps of Mary and her children have faded into the distance before he drops the blaster in his hand to the ground. It’ll take twelve steps, Hux estimates before he’ll be standing in full view of the troopers. Four sets of three counts. He tugs on his wrinkled shirt, the way he used to do to his uniform, and straightens his back. He breathes in deeply, exhales and begins to walk.

One…two…three…breathe…

One….two…three…breathe…

One…two…three…breathe…

One…two…three…breathe….

“Stop!” shouts a trooper stepping out in front of him. Slowly, troopers begin to surround him, blasters raised, pointed at him. “Hands up in the air. Identify yourself.”

Hux takes in the sight of the trooper’s armors, they are black now, better to camouflage in the night than the stark white of old. It is one of Hux’s designs.

“Identify yourself!” the trooper repeats.

Hux smirks at him. “Don’t recognize me, soldier? You must be new.”

“Hands in the air and identify yourself!” the trooper’s voice rises.

Slowly, indolently, Hux lifts his hands in the air. “My name is Brendol Hux the Second and I’m surrendering myself to Kylo Ren.”

The world seems to freeze. The commotion in the background dies as all stop to look. Hux sees several of the troopers lower their weapons a fraction, while others secured their grip on their blasters and held it higher.

Then came the shadow of the tall, dark figure of Kylo Ren appearing behind the line of troopers surrounding Hux. Slowly, the troopers part and there he is, right in front of Hux.

Hux looks into those dark slits, wondering what he’d find if he could see the knight’s eyes. Would they be empty and lifeless? Would they recognize him?

_There you are, look at you: Snoke’s precious weapon,_ Hux thinks at Ren. Does Ren hear him? Hux wonders.

If Ren hears him, he doesn’t react.

In that stiff, lifeless way, Ren lifts his lightsaber, igniting the weapon, sending the blazing red band out to point at Hux’s throat. Through the amplifier of the mask, the detached, distorted voice says to Hux, “On your knees, traitor.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's part two. Part Three will be coming soon, in the meantime if you are enjoying this story, please consider [following me on tumblr](http://theevaline.tumblr.com)


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